Complexe-simple

By 1939 Wassily Kandinsky had been living in Paris for six years, having left Germany after the Nazis shut the Bauhaus where he taught and branded his work degenerate. Exile changed his painting. The bold primary colours and hard geometry of his Bauhaus years gave way to soft pastel grounds and small floating shapes that look almost biological, little forms like embryos, cells or sea creatures drifting across the canvas. He borrowed some of them straight from biology and zoology books. He made this in the last months before the Second World War reached France, working in his studio at Neuilly, on the western edge of Paris.