.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Implicit within all of Kandinsky’s late work is the notion of evolution. After the artist’s move to Paris in 1933, the forms within his work became increasingly amorphous and the appearance of strange embryonic creatures more frequent. These features, like the artist’s frequent use of the kind of black background that appears in this work, reflect Kandinsky’s cosmic sense of vision and his belief in abstraction as a growing and evolving form. This technique of using dark paper as a backdrop for his colorful gouaches, which he himself called “dessins colorés,” was inspired by his early Art Nouveau years. Kandinsky would either use a dark paper or prepare it himself by laying a dark tone on white paper before applying the bright gouache colors that vibrate the composition.
Having previously departed from natural representation and transitioned to the austere geometry during of Bauhaus years, the late 1930s and early 1940s were a period of development of a new, but otherworldly type of naturalism that reflected what he believed would be the birth of a new abstract language of the spirit. Employing predominantly pastel colors, his art came to display a graceful lyricism that moved away from the direct and often confrontational tensions he had set up in his work at the Bauhaus in favor of motifs that encouraged a sense of rhythm and music.
In this so-called Paris period, Kandinsky was ever more acquainted with the leading figures of the Paris art world, notably the Surrealists. The works of Jean (Hans) Arp and Joan Miró have often been cited by critics as having an impact on Kandinsky’s painting after the Bauhaus. Although the artist was quick to play down the extent of this influence, he was clearly absorbed in the ideas around myths and dreams but in a manner that was entirely his own. In this, his career echoes the tribute given to him by the other great biomorphic artist of the 1930s, Arp. “Kandinsky grew to perfection as naturally as a fruit develops and ripens” Arp wrote. “Anyone not resisting nature will become beauty and spirit. In time and space, those divine mirrors, his work is aglow with spiritual reality…Things blossom, sparkle, ripple in his paintings and poems. They speak of old blood and young stones” (quoted in “Stone Formed by the Human Hand,” Arp on Arp, New York, 1972, p. 227).
Having previously departed from natural representation and transitioned to the austere geometry during of Bauhaus years, the late 1930s and early 1940s were a period of development of a new, but otherworldly type of naturalism that reflected what he believed would be the birth of a new abstract language of the spirit. Employing predominantly pastel colors, his art came to display a graceful lyricism that moved away from the direct and often confrontational tensions he had set up in his work at the Bauhaus in favor of motifs that encouraged a sense of rhythm and music.
In this so-called Paris period, Kandinsky was ever more acquainted with the leading figures of the Paris art world, notably the Surrealists. The works of Jean (Hans) Arp and Joan Miró have often been cited by critics as having an impact on Kandinsky’s painting after the Bauhaus. Although the artist was quick to play down the extent of this influence, he was clearly absorbed in the ideas around myths and dreams but in a manner that was entirely his own. In this, his career echoes the tribute given to him by the other great biomorphic artist of the 1930s, Arp. “Kandinsky grew to perfection as naturally as a fruit develops and ripens” Arp wrote. “Anyone not resisting nature will become beauty and spirit. In time and space, those divine mirrors, his work is aglow with spiritual reality…Things blossom, sparkle, ripple in his paintings and poems. They speak of old blood and young stones” (quoted in “Stone Formed by the Human Hand,” Arp on Arp, New York, 1972, p. 227).