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Lot Essay
La figure blanche was executed in 1938 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Thrown out of the Bauhaus and forced to live in exile from his adopted homeland of Germany after Hitler's ascend to power, Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he remained with his wife Nina until his death, in 1944. They took an apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, marking the beginning of the artist's final creative phase, his so called 'Paris period'.
The Paris years marked an era of new experimentation and departure for Kandinsky. As pointed out by Frank Whitford: ‘Of these developments, the introduction of organic imagery is the most striking. It was not without precedent, however, since it occasionally recalls elements that had appeared in the artist’s pre-World War I work. It was as though Kandinsky were seeking a synthesis between his first, nature-based abstract style and the more disciplined approach developed at the Bauhaus […]’ (F. Whitford, Kandinsky, Watercolours and other Works on Paper, London, 1999, p. 82).
In the present work what seems to be a pulsating, amoeboid-shaped micro-organism viewed through a powerful microscope, appears to float in air or water. According to Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, the present work is the earlier gouache variation of a well-known painting bearing the same, poetical title, La figure blanche, created in January 1943, and today in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the present drawing, the bright white gouache is laid on black paper, a technique Kandinsky called dessins colorés, and that was inspired by his early Art Nouveau years. The artist would either use dark paper or he would prepare it himself by laying a dark tone on white paper before applying the bright gouache tones, which make the composition vibrate, as is the case in La figure blanche.
The Paris years marked an era of new experimentation and departure for Kandinsky. As pointed out by Frank Whitford: ‘Of these developments, the introduction of organic imagery is the most striking. It was not without precedent, however, since it occasionally recalls elements that had appeared in the artist’s pre-World War I work. It was as though Kandinsky were seeking a synthesis between his first, nature-based abstract style and the more disciplined approach developed at the Bauhaus […]’ (F. Whitford, Kandinsky, Watercolours and other Works on Paper, London, 1999, p. 82).
In the present work what seems to be a pulsating, amoeboid-shaped micro-organism viewed through a powerful microscope, appears to float in air or water. According to Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, the present work is the earlier gouache variation of a well-known painting bearing the same, poetical title, La figure blanche, created in January 1943, and today in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the present drawing, the bright white gouache is laid on black paper, a technique Kandinsky called dessins colorés, and that was inspired by his early Art Nouveau years. The artist would either use dark paper or he would prepare it himself by laying a dark tone on white paper before applying the bright gouache tones, which make the composition vibrate, as is the case in La figure blanche.