小重音

Kandinsky painted this in January 1940, in a sixth-floor flat at Neuilly-sur-Seine just west of Paris. France had declared war on Germany four months earlier and almost nothing had happened yet. The Germans would be in Paris by June.

He was 73 and had taken French citizenship the year before, after German museums stripped out his work as degenerate in 1937. The panel is small, about 32 by 42 centimetres. The shapes on it are soft and creaturely, closer to what turns up under a microscope than to the hard circles and grids he had been painting in Germany a decade earlier, and he kept plates of embryos and sea life in the flat to look at.

Solomon Guggenheim had started buying from him in 1930, and the museum in New York now holds around 150 of his paintings.