Wassily Kandinsky

Nina Kandinsky, Paris (until 1974)
Gallery Maeght, Paris (acquired from the above)
Guy Loudmer, Paris

Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Kandinsky: Gouaches, aquarelles, dessins, 1947
Liège, Belgium, Association pour le progrès intellectuel et artistique de la Wallonie, Kandinsky: gouaches & dessins, 1947
London, Gimpel Fils, Kandinsky, 1950
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Centennaire Kandinsky, 1966, no. 99
Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Kandinsky, 1972, no. 72
Zürich, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky: Olbilder, Gouachen, Ziechnungen, 1972, no. 57
Madrid, Fundacion Juan March, Kandinsky 1923-1944, 1978, no. 58
Tokyo, Fuji Television Gallery, Wassily Kandinsky, 1989, illustrated

Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, 1922-1944, vol. II, Ithaca, 1994, no. 1225, illustrated p. 431

La forme tournée, executed in 1938, reflects Kandinsky’s new approach to art. He saw non-objective art as the appropriate artistic medium for the new era of our spiritual development and sought to create an art that would be as purely, non-objectively expressive as music. Kandinsky desired to present a picture of the spiritual development of humankind, with the artist as a prophet whose vision draws humanity upward. The works from his Paris years (1933-1944) have been described as ‘expressing a superior synthesis’ ( quoted in W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsk:Life and Work, London, 1959, p. 227);  in Kandinsky’s language this would mean that they reflect a union of compositional technique and intuition but also a symbiotic relationship with scientific thinking. La forme tournée encapsulates this synthesis whilst at the same time still evoking the style of his earlier Bauhaus period with its abstract geometric forms and the reduced pictorial vocabulary. The present work, containing white graphic figures and coloured circles on the black monochrome background, illustrates the relationship between the forms themselves as well as their own relationship to the pictorial surface.

Kandinsky has defined different relationships for the purpose of constructing a composition which has a close relation to the picture-plane. In one case the artist uses them complementarily to make the forms appear to ‘become one’ with the picture-plane; in the other case he uses them contradictorily so that the forms appear to ‘lie free and float in space’ (quoted in P. Overy, Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye, London, 1969, p.141). In La forme tournée Kandinsky uses the latter method whereby the elements seem to float freely on the picture plane and the red, green and purple coloured different sized circles seem to come out of the surface into the viewer’s space. The bright colours within the circles, which are not outlined but rather defined and intersected by the white graphic figures, emphasise this effect. The title of the work La forme tournée (The turned form) seems to refer to the intersecting white graphic forms with the circles which at the point of intersection ‘turn’ from white to black, demonstrating Kandinsky’s complex theories on form and colour within the pictorial realm.