Dois pontos verdes

Kandinsky made this in 1935, two years after he settled in Paris, and the city is visible in it. He mixed sand into the oil, a habit then current in Paris studios, which gives the surface a fine grain. Shapes turn up that have nothing geometric about them, soft curling single-celled forms of the kind he collected in zoological and embryological plates from books and journals. They drift among stacked transparent rectangles that make new colours where they overlap. The composition was worked out first as a watercolour, under the blunter title Joined Surfaces. The canvas is over a metre and a half across, and it came to the French state in 1976 from his widow Nina, part of the large group of his paintings she left to Paris.