Orange-violet

Kandinsky painted this in October 1935, in a flat at Neuilly-sur-Seine on the edge of Paris. He had been there less than two years. The Bauhaus had been shut down in Berlin in 1933 under Nazi pressure, and he and his wife left Germany that December.

Paris was polite and little more. Its dealers had settled on Surrealism, and the soft drifting shapes of his French years, nearer to plates from a biology book than to the hard circles of his Bauhaus teaching, come partly from that company.

His buyers were elsewhere. Solomon Guggenheim in New York had been collecting him since a visit to the Dessau studio in 1930, and this canvas went into the group that opened to the public in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.