El todo

The Germans entered Paris in June 1940. Kandinsky was 74, a Russian who had done his best-known teaching in Germany, where three years earlier his kind of abstraction had been put on public show as degenerate. He left for the Pyrenees when the invasion came, then returned to his flat in Neuilly-sur-Seine and stayed there through the occupation, seeing few people and selling almost nothing. The work of those Paris years is where the ruled circles and triangles of his Bauhaus period give way to soft shapes closer to things seen under a microscope, with pastel and acid colours in place of the old primaries. This canvas is just over a metre across and comes from that stretch. The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo acquired it in 1987.