Composição X

Kandinsky finished this in Paris in 1939, and it was the last of his Compositions, the series of large canvases he had always treated as his most ambitious work. He had ended up in France after the Nazis shut the Bauhaus, where he taught, and branded modern art like his own degenerate. By then he was in his seventies. Against an unusual black ground he scatters floating shapes that look almost biological, like things seen under a microscope, in clear bright colour. After a lifetime insisting that painting could work on us the way music does, without picturing anything, he never began another Composition. He died in 1944.