Drawn from the museum's permanent collection, Kandinsky in Paris, 1934-1944 is an intimate presentation featuring paintings from the last 11 years of Kandinsky’s life-a prolific period of the artist’s career.

After the Nazi government closed the Berlin Bauhaus where he taught in 1933, Kandinsky settled into the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. In France, his formal vocabulary changed, and diagrams of amoebas, embryos, and other primitive cellular and plant forms provided the sources for the whimsical biomorphic imagery that would be predominant in his late paintings. Instead of his usual primary colors, Kandinsky favored softer, pastel hues-pink, violet, turquoise, and gold-reminiscent of the colors of his Russian artwork. He also increasingly experimented with materials, such as combining sand with pigment. While Kandinsky found that his art had affinities with Surrealism and other abstract movements in Paris, he never fully immersed himself in the city’s artistic environment and instead continued to work independently.

This exhibition is organized by Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, and Megan Fontanella, Associate Curator, Collections and Provenance.