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Lot Essay
Appearing in a tumult of festive colour, playful forms and swirling movement, Esquisse pour Autour du cercle is a striking example of the new artistic vocabulary that emerged in Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings during the 1930s, following the closure of the Berlin Bauhaus and his subsequent move to Paris. Drawing inspiration from minute organisms and natural forms, the artist introduced increasingly fluid shapes into his paintings at this time, their organic, undulating lines offering a dynamic contrast to the sharp geometry which had dominated his works of the previous decade. This novelty of form took its lead from the illustrations of amoebas, embryos and microscopic biology that Kandinsky had discovered in contemporary text books, encyclopaedias, and scientific periodicals, their unusual, otherworldly forms offering him a richly varied set of new visual references to work from.
This interest in the organic and the microscopic was accentuated during a short summer holiday along the Normandy Coast with his wife in 1934, where the artist marvelled at the miniscule life-forms that populated the shoreline. Writing to Will Grohmann about the trip, he explained: ‘I have stored up many impressions, and hope to work well. Especially beautiful is the high and low tide. During low tide, the ocean retreats around 400-450 metres, and you can walk along the floor of the ocean, where, you can observe the lives of tiny, almost microscopic animals in little puddles and in the moist sand… I also opened up a little shell and a long, soft, thin horn emerged… The threatening horn says to me: ‘Don’t eat me – learn from me!’ Which I am in fact doing’ (Kandinsky, quoted in M. Baumgartner, A. Hoberg, & C. Hopfengart, eds., Klee & Kandinsky: Neighbours, Friends, Rivals, exh. cat., Munich & London, 2015, p. 289). Kandinsky continued to draw on the ‘impressions’ he made during this trip throughout the rest of his career, introducing increasingly stylised iterations of amoebas, underwater animals and diatoms, into complex networks and patterns in his work.
In the present work, Kandinsky incorporates these biomorphic forms alongside a series of carefully delineated circles, rectangles and triangles, to create a kaleidoscopic constellation of forms that appears to float, weightless, in a fantastical pictorial space. These forms coalesce into several distinct clusters, their combinations suggesting figurative elements such as boats, buildings, and serpentine creatures in some cases, while in others remaining completely abstract, fluid forms. Filled with a diverse array of colours and patterns, these clusters contain their own internal sense of gravity, which binds the multiple parts together in a flowing, amorphous shape. At the centre of the composition, a glowing red circle with internal geometric detailing radiates a powerful energy, and imbues the painting with a dynamic sense of movement as it appears to draw the other elements towards its centre. Like a great star pulling a series of planets into its orbit, this lends the painting a cosmic atmosphere, as the shapes appear gripped in a great sweeping wave of motion that flows around the circle.
Conceived as the final study for the major painting now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Autour du cercle, this work offers us a rare insight into Kandinsky’s artistic process at this time, as he gradually developed the visual and chromatic dynamics of his ideas across several different stages before beginning a large composition. In her memoirs, Nina Kandinsky recalls that her husband ‘had the rare ability to visualize the world of his paintings in his head, with their colours and their shapes, exactly as he carried them out on canvas later. His flashes of inspiration were like high-speed snapshots that appeared to him in a state of illumination, and he tried to get them down on paper immediately, using small quick strokes’ (N. Kandinsky, quoted in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1985, p. 32). Using these sketches as a starting point, Kandinsky would create increasingly detailed studies of these ideas, gradually evolving the design across multiple sketches and drawings, as he defined borders and shapes, introduced new patterns, and played with the scale of different elements, before reaching a composition he was happy with.
Esquisse pour Autour du cercle represents the final, and perhaps most important, stage of this process of adjustment and refinement, as the artist introduced colour into the composition for the first time, testing the relationships and tensions that arise between the various shades and tones he had envisioned. The painting is filled with a vivid array of colour, featuring vibrant reds, purples and greens alongside more delicate notes of blue, pink and orange, in a lustrous colour palette that holds close affinities to works from Kandinsky’s early oeuvre, particularly his fairy-tale images from the period 1906-1907. Within this cacophony of colour, intriguing juxtapositions of contrasting hues and tonalities emerge, with multiple shades appearing alongside one another in a single form. For example, the cluster of bee-hive shaped structures on the left hand side of the composition features no less than forty different shades within its borders which, when combined, creates a rich, varied pattern that enlivens the internal forms. As the artist explained, minor adjustments to the colour palette could completely transform a work of art: ‘A tiny little change of a single colour – almost invisible – suddenly lends the work a boundless perfection’ (Kandinsky, quoted in Kandinsky, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, p. 89). Thus, Esquisse pour Autour du cercle offered Kandinsky an integral space in which to test his ideas, examining how they worked when translated from his mind into paint, and refining the relationships between colour and form in his design.
Although Esquisse pour Autour du cercle was executed in April 1940, less than a month before the German invasion of France, the painting’s festive and jubilant atmosphere gives little indication of the political tensions and growing fear which were sweeping across Europe at this time. Kandinsky and his wife had fled Germany less than a decade previously, and had watched from afar as the artist’s work was removed from state collections as part of the new government’s programme of cultural cleansing. However, Kandinsky did not allow the threat of war to negatively impact his art, which he believed to be situated ‘outside space and time’ (Kandinsky, quoted in W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, His Life and Work, London, 1959, p. 242). When the German army crossed into French territory on 10 May 1940, Kandinsky and his wife moved to the town of Cauterets in the Pyrenees. It was here that the artist continued the ideas explored in the present work, retaining the vibrant and joyful atmosphere and bringing his designs to fruition in the striking Autour du Cercle over the course of that summer.
This interest in the organic and the microscopic was accentuated during a short summer holiday along the Normandy Coast with his wife in 1934, where the artist marvelled at the miniscule life-forms that populated the shoreline. Writing to Will Grohmann about the trip, he explained: ‘I have stored up many impressions, and hope to work well. Especially beautiful is the high and low tide. During low tide, the ocean retreats around 400-450 metres, and you can walk along the floor of the ocean, where, you can observe the lives of tiny, almost microscopic animals in little puddles and in the moist sand… I also opened up a little shell and a long, soft, thin horn emerged… The threatening horn says to me: ‘Don’t eat me – learn from me!’ Which I am in fact doing’ (Kandinsky, quoted in M. Baumgartner, A. Hoberg, & C. Hopfengart, eds., Klee & Kandinsky: Neighbours, Friends, Rivals, exh. cat., Munich & London, 2015, p. 289). Kandinsky continued to draw on the ‘impressions’ he made during this trip throughout the rest of his career, introducing increasingly stylised iterations of amoebas, underwater animals and diatoms, into complex networks and patterns in his work.
In the present work, Kandinsky incorporates these biomorphic forms alongside a series of carefully delineated circles, rectangles and triangles, to create a kaleidoscopic constellation of forms that appears to float, weightless, in a fantastical pictorial space. These forms coalesce into several distinct clusters, their combinations suggesting figurative elements such as boats, buildings, and serpentine creatures in some cases, while in others remaining completely abstract, fluid forms. Filled with a diverse array of colours and patterns, these clusters contain their own internal sense of gravity, which binds the multiple parts together in a flowing, amorphous shape. At the centre of the composition, a glowing red circle with internal geometric detailing radiates a powerful energy, and imbues the painting with a dynamic sense of movement as it appears to draw the other elements towards its centre. Like a great star pulling a series of planets into its orbit, this lends the painting a cosmic atmosphere, as the shapes appear gripped in a great sweeping wave of motion that flows around the circle.
Conceived as the final study for the major painting now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Autour du cercle, this work offers us a rare insight into Kandinsky’s artistic process at this time, as he gradually developed the visual and chromatic dynamics of his ideas across several different stages before beginning a large composition. In her memoirs, Nina Kandinsky recalls that her husband ‘had the rare ability to visualize the world of his paintings in his head, with their colours and their shapes, exactly as he carried them out on canvas later. His flashes of inspiration were like high-speed snapshots that appeared to him in a state of illumination, and he tried to get them down on paper immediately, using small quick strokes’ (N. Kandinsky, quoted in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1985, p. 32). Using these sketches as a starting point, Kandinsky would create increasingly detailed studies of these ideas, gradually evolving the design across multiple sketches and drawings, as he defined borders and shapes, introduced new patterns, and played with the scale of different elements, before reaching a composition he was happy with.
Esquisse pour Autour du cercle represents the final, and perhaps most important, stage of this process of adjustment and refinement, as the artist introduced colour into the composition for the first time, testing the relationships and tensions that arise between the various shades and tones he had envisioned. The painting is filled with a vivid array of colour, featuring vibrant reds, purples and greens alongside more delicate notes of blue, pink and orange, in a lustrous colour palette that holds close affinities to works from Kandinsky’s early oeuvre, particularly his fairy-tale images from the period 1906-1907. Within this cacophony of colour, intriguing juxtapositions of contrasting hues and tonalities emerge, with multiple shades appearing alongside one another in a single form. For example, the cluster of bee-hive shaped structures on the left hand side of the composition features no less than forty different shades within its borders which, when combined, creates a rich, varied pattern that enlivens the internal forms. As the artist explained, minor adjustments to the colour palette could completely transform a work of art: ‘A tiny little change of a single colour – almost invisible – suddenly lends the work a boundless perfection’ (Kandinsky, quoted in Kandinsky, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, p. 89). Thus, Esquisse pour Autour du cercle offered Kandinsky an integral space in which to test his ideas, examining how they worked when translated from his mind into paint, and refining the relationships between colour and form in his design.
Although Esquisse pour Autour du cercle was executed in April 1940, less than a month before the German invasion of France, the painting’s festive and jubilant atmosphere gives little indication of the political tensions and growing fear which were sweeping across Europe at this time. Kandinsky and his wife had fled Germany less than a decade previously, and had watched from afar as the artist’s work was removed from state collections as part of the new government’s programme of cultural cleansing. However, Kandinsky did not allow the threat of war to negatively impact his art, which he believed to be situated ‘outside space and time’ (Kandinsky, quoted in W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, His Life and Work, London, 1959, p. 242). When the German army crossed into French territory on 10 May 1940, Kandinsky and his wife moved to the town of Cauterets in the Pyrenees. It was here that the artist continued the ideas explored in the present work, retaining the vibrant and joyful atmosphere and bringing his designs to fruition in the striking Autour du Cercle over the course of that summer.