二つの環境

By December 1933 Kandinsky was 67 and starting again. The Bauhaus, where he had taught for a decade, had been closed that summer under pressure from the new German government, and he left Berlin for a flat in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the western edge of Paris. This canvas comes out of his first full year of work there. The circles and grids of the Bauhaus pictures have loosened into soft creature-like shapes, closer to what turns up on a microscope slide, and he was in fact working from the illustrated science books he kept by him. In these Paris years he often mixed sand into his paint to roughen the surface. The picture reached Amsterdam through Pierre Alexandre Regnault, a Dutch businessman who bought new Paris painting through the 1930s and lent most of it to the Stedelijk.