Photo By Gail

After the Bauhaus closed under political pressure in 1933, Vasily Kandinsky was forced to abandon Germany for a second time, and he settled in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Sein. The artist increasingly experimented with materials and colors, favoring pastels and gold-hues reminiscent of Russian origin. Likewise, Surrealism and the natural sciences clearly inform Kandisky’s compositions from this period. In Dominant Curve (Courbe Dominante – 1936), a schematized pink embryo floats near the upper-right corner while the figures within the green rectangle in the upper left recall microscopic marine animals, These buoyant, biomorphic images suggest a hope for a postwar rebirth and regeneration, despite the worsening political environment.

Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.