Dos figuras

Kandinsky left Germany at the end of 1933, weeks after the Bauhaus was forced to close, and settled in a flat at Neuilly-sur-Seine on the edge of Paris. The work he made there changed. The hard circles and triangles of his Bauhaus years softened into forms that look grown rather than drawn, taken from biological illustration, from plates of embryos, larvae and sea creatures. This small sheet of 1935 sets those soft shapes on the left against stricter geometry on the right. Two years later his paintings were pulled out of German public collections, and some of them hung in the Munich exhibition the Nazi state staged to ridicule modern art. The collector Alfred Holbrook, who founded the museum in Athens, Georgia in memory of his wife, gave this one there in 1946.