하늘색

Kandinsky painted this in 1940, in the first year of the war, from an apartment in Neuilly on the edge of Paris. He had fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, where he taught, and branded his kind of art degenerate. Now in his seventies and cut off from the German public that had known his work, he lived quietly and kept painting. Against a wide, even field of pale blue drift small soft-edged shapes, bright and rounded, more like tiny sea creatures or organisms under a lens than anything geometric. It is a lighter, more playful language than the hard lines of his Bauhaus years, one he found in Paris near painters like Joan Miro and Jean Arp. He titled it for the color that holds everything else, the blue of the open sky.