Simple

When the First World War broke out in 1914 Kandinsky, a Russian who had built his career in Munich, was suddenly an enemy alien and had to leave Germany for Moscow. This small ink-and-watercolour sheet comes from those unsettled years back home, around 1916, when he was making few large paintings and a lot of work on paper. He gave it the plain title Simple. A couple of years later he used the image to illustrate the Russian edition of his memoir, the book of reminiscences he had first published in German before the war. His widow Nina left it, with many drawings of this period, to the museum in Paris in 1981.