抑制された飛躍

Kandinsky painted this in Paris in 1944, in the last year of his life and under German occupation, when good materials were hard to come by. It is small and painted on cardboard, and it belongs to the quiet late style he developed in France, where his once-blazing abstractions softened into little biomorphic shapes that look like things seen under a microscope, cells and creatures drifting across a pale ground. The French title, Elan tempere, means something like a restrained surge, and that is what the picture does, holding its energy in check. Kandinsky had spent decades arguing that colour and form could speak as directly as music, from his Russian years through the Bauhaus to this apartment outside Paris. He died that December, and this is among the very last things he made.