Figura bianca

January 1943. Paris had been under German occupation for two and a half years, Kandinsky was 76 and living out at Neuilly on the western edge of the city, and canvas was as hard to come by as everything else. He painted this on a piece of board a little over half a metre high. Almost everything from his last years is small for the same reason, and the forms inside them are small too, soft biological shapes that look enlarged rather than invented, nearer to something under laboratory glass than to the circles and hard angles of his Bauhaus teaching years. He was still selling to New York through all of it. The picture entered Solomon Guggenheim's collection there in 1947, three years after Kandinsky died.