Wassily Kandinsky

Jeanne Bucher, Paris
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired by December 1945)
Acquired by the late owner after 1970

The artist’s handlist: ‘Watercolours’: iv1938, 590, L'accent rouge (gouache)
Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. II, no. 1224

Executed on black paper, laid down on board, which is the artist's original arrangement, floating in the mount. The medium is fresh and unfaded and this work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration.
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L’accent rouge is an intricately executed gouache from Kandinsky's mature Parisian period after his emigration from Germany in 1934. The radical change in style from the Bauhaus combined with a series of innovative technical and theoretical advances led Kandinsky to produce an extraordinarily exciting and original group of works. One such technical element was in fact a revival of his earliest successes: 'At the same time as his palette approached Art Nouveau delicacy, Kandinsky reverted to a technique that won attention for his first entries at the Salon d'Automne at the beginning of the century: black backgrounds. On black paper or paper colored black, he used tempera to deposit a few spots of color - and this was enough to make the whole surface vibrate immediately with phosphorescent spots and filaments' (Christian Derouet in Kandinsky in Paris (exhibition catalogue), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1985, p. 33).

In Paris Kandinsky, relieved from his duties as a professor at the Bauhaus, used the time and relative freedoms afforded by his situation to concentrate wholly on his art. Jelena Hahl-Koch writes: 'It is clear from his multifaceted late phase that he would not have achieved such maturity had he been politically or socially active. Unlike most artists, Kandinsky was not able to devote himself fully to art until he was thirty, and his demands were consequentially greater; he did not want to paint only squares or do just lyrical work; he wanted both, combining drama and everyday objects, juxtaposing beauty and ugliness, tranquillity and explosions' (J. Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky, London, 1993, p. 324). The artist's wife Nina added: 'Certainly in his Parisian period Kandinsky is wholly present. We discover there a Kandinsky who remembers everything that during the course of his work he appears to have forgotten only in order to concentrate the essence and to give us, in this dazzling final firework, the ultimate and thrilling images' (N. Kandinsky in Kandinsky, Parisian Period 1934-1944 (exhibition catalogue), M. Knoedler & Co., New York, 1969, p. 25).