Composición IX

By 1936 Kandinsky was living outside Paris, at Neuilly on the edge of the city. He had left Germany three years earlier, after the Nazis shut the Bauhaus where he taught and began branding his kind of abstraction degenerate. Composition IX comes out of that Paris exile, and it looks unlike his Bauhaus work: four broad diagonal bands of colour cross the canvas, and over them float soft, almost biological little shapes he had picked up from the Surrealists he now lived among. He first called it One and the Other. Three years later the French state bought it, the only painting of his to enter a French museum while he was alive. He had asked 100,000 francs for it and was paid 5,000.