La Forme blanche inhabits the realm of pure aesthetic expression. Kandinsky and his wife Nina left Germany in 1933 and settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy inner suburb of Paris, where he was to live out the remainder of his life (see fig. 1). In 1934, Kandinsky wrote to Jawlensky: "We don't want to leave Germany permanently (we've got deep roots there!), but we'd like to stay in Paris for a couple of years... Our flat's on the sixth floor, with a great view of the Seine, the hills behind it, and a huge expanse of sky. The Bois de Boulogne is a couple of minutes away" (quoted in Jelena Hahl Koch, Kandinsky, London, 1993, p. 322).

Kandinsky’s years in Paris resulted in works that many consider the crescendo of his artistic ideology. While his development was strongly influenced in the 1920s by his Bauhaus colleague Paul Klee, whose watercolors and oil paintings of these years demonstrate similar artistic predilections, Kandinsky’s production in Paris took a different direction. Paris at the time was culturally dominated by the Surrealists. The stimuli of Surrealist Paris inspired dramatic manifestations of color and form, most notably the shift from primary colors to pastels. Sharp textural and color contrasts characterize many works from his period, evoking a distinctive “musicality.” 

Although Kandinsky was well aware of Surrealism—he had exhibited with the proto-surrealist Dada group in Zurich in 1916 and the Surrealists in Paris in 1933—he was never a Surrealist. Their emphasis on automatic writing and the unconscious was from his concept of “inner necessity.” Rather he became interested in the idea of nature and natural growth. The new motifs that were incorporated into his paintings in 1934 were biological: images particularly related to zoology and embryology (see fig. 2). The sources for many of Kandinsky’s biological forms from this period can be found in the encyclopedia Die Kultur der Gegenwart, whose volumes were in the artist’s library and marked in many instances with references to illustrations which in turn can be found in specific canvases from the period. Kandinsky also clipped photographs from scientific articles on deep-sea life, such as algae, sea-polyps and plankton. Vivian Endicott Barnett suggests that "Kandinsky's images of amoebas, embryos and marine invertebrates convey spiritual meaning of beginning, regeneration and a common origin of all life. Because of his spiritual beliefs and his ideas on abstract art, Kandinsky would have responded to the meanings or rebirth and renewal inherent in the new imagery of his Paris pictures" (Vivian Endicott Barnett in Kandinsky in Paris (exhibition catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1985, p. 87).