무제, 629번

Kandinsky left Germany for France in December 1933, months after the Bauhaus in Berlin was shut down, and spent the rest of his life in a flat at Neuilly-sur-Seine. What he painted there looks little like the Munich pictures that made his name. From 1934 he began borrowing shapes from biology. The art historian Vivian Barnett traced many of them to a German encyclopedia, Die Kultur der Gegenwart, which stood in his library with its plates of embryos and sea creatures marked up. The number in the title is his own bookkeeping. Kandinsky kept a handwritten list of every painting he finished and numbered them in sequence, and this is entry 629. In 1937 the Nazi purge of so-called degenerate art cleared his work out of German public collections. By then this canvas was in Paris, and it came to Worcester in 1970 from the estate of a local collector.