Ruban aux carrés

Kandinsky painted this in January 1944, in his flat at Neuilly just outside Paris, in the fourth winter of the German occupation. He was 77. His work had been stripped out of German museums as degenerate art in 1937, he had almost no market left, and canvas was hard to get, so the late pictures are small and worked in gouache and oil on board. This one is about 42 centimetres high. The shapes in it are the soft biological forms, the kind of thing that turns up on a microscope slide, that fill his Paris years. Paris was liberated that August. Kandinsky died in December, and the painting crossed to New York three years after that, into the Guggenheim's founding collection.