Private Collection (acquired circa the 1980s)
By descent to the present owner

Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, vol.II : 1922-1944, no. 1326, illustration of the artist's sketch, p. 508

Executed on brown card, not laid down, fixed to the mount along the edges. There are artist's pinholes in the centre of the circles. Aside from a media mark near the left edge and one tiny paintloss in the green semicircle in the lower left corner, this work is in excellent original condition.
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 “Softness above all else … in 1940 Kandinsky denies the harshness of the time, occupied Paris, restrictions of every kind. He takes refuge from the misery of everyday existence in an invented world “occupied” exclusively by fantasy.”

Christian Derouet

 

Fleeing Germany and the rise of Nazism, Vassily and Nina Kandinsky lived in exile in Paris. The artist took stock of his career and decided he must urgently find a new direction and unity. Faithful to the theories he had expounded in his two main publications Du Spirituel dans l’art (1911) and Point, ligne sur plan (1926), his works bear witness to his desire to deconstruct traditional pictorial space in favour of a new place, where sensitivity, interiority, the physical and emotional reality of being; what the painter termed: “The internal necessity”. A sort of “mystical appearance of primordial forms” was thus born. Kandinsky expresses his entire creative capacity; he imagines multi-shaped organisms that spring from the depths of his subconscious. Their round, supple, floating contours enclose fresh, delicate colours. Here they appear to be suspended in the air, evolving melodiously against a sand-coloured background. Shapes completely levitating in some sort of aerial ballet performance, a new visual poetic, with a light background, this work recalls the world of Miró (notably his Constellations series), an artist wh🌞om Kandinsky particu෴larly admired.