Footnotes

Provenance
Nierendorf Gallery, New York, no. 28.
Hilla von Rebay Collection, Westport (acquired by 1945).
Nina Kandinsky, Paris.
Galerie Maeght, Paris, no. 9433 (acquired from the above by 1970).
Private collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1975).
A gift from the above to the present owner in 1983.

Exhibited
London, April 1937.
(Possibly) Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, no. 0060.
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Museum of Non-Objective Painting, In Memory of Wassily Kandinsky, 15 March - 15 May 1945, no. 146.
Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Kandinsky, Époque parisienne, 1934-1944, 2 June – 2 July 1949, no. 43.
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky, November 1953, no. 42.
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky, Période parisienne, 1934-1944, 1969, no. 1 (later travelled to New York).
Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Wassily Kandinsky, Gemälde 1900-1944, 10 July – 27
September 1970, no. 129.
Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Wassily Kandinsky-Paul Klee, 30 October 1971 – 9 January 1972, no. 31.
Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Wassily Kandinsky rétrospective, 29 January – 12 March 1972, no. 38.
Zurich, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky, April 1972, no. 45.
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Hommage de Paris à Kandinsky, La conquête de l'abstraction, l'époque parisienne, 7 June – 30 July 1972, no. 16.

Literature
The artist's handlist, Vol. IV, no. 597.
W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Life and Work, New York, 1958, no. 434 (illustrated p. 385).
H.K. Roethel & J.K. Benjamin, Kandinsky, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. II, 1916-1944, London, 1984, no. 1034 (illustrated p. 934).


His admirable eye, merging with his faint veil of glass to form perfect crystal lights up with the sudden iridescent glitter of quartz. It is the eye of one of the first and one of the greatest revolutionaries of vision.

- André Breton in his preface for the catalogue of the 1938 Kandinsky exhibition organised by Peggy Guggenheim in London, translated by Samuel Beckett.

A conjuror of sublime artistic realms, Wassily Kandinsky was limitless in achieving grand and adventurous compositions. But in the harsh grounds of reality – namely, Europe in 1933 – he once again found himself torn between worlds. Kandinsky and his wife Nina's uprooting from Berlin had been sudden, spurred by the Nazi regime's coordinated attack on Modern art, which culminated in the closing of Kandinsky's beloved Bauhaus school. As a Russian-born artist whose fame was then more pronounced in Germany than in France, Kandinsky encountered in Paris a strange hybrid of novelty and familiarity. Cubism was enjoying a fervent resurgence, the Surrealists were transforming the definition of art, and the Abstraction-Création movement was revitalising austerity and constructivism in art. But none of these dogmatic movements, with their rigid formulae and manifestos, wooed Kandinsky. While he extracted certain stylistic and technical innovations from his peers, he ultimately sought freedom and solitude in his wholly individual style.

The present work was created at the outset of Kandinsky's richly prolific Paris period, commencing in 1934 after a six-month hiatus due to his and Nina's relocation. In his new studio at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Kandinsky generated a body of work that exploded with vision and colour, introducing a fresh vocabulary of forms grounded in the infinite complexity of the natural world. Despite his being forced to leave Germany at the brink of its demise, these paintings - the first of which was aptly titled Montée gracieuse ('Graceful ascent') - exude optimism, sentimentality and faith in the future. Toiling in relative seclusion, Kandinsky reaffirmed his persona as a painter of worlds, concocting grandiose visions of words, sounds and organisms, distilled by his unique and highly spiritual painterly formula.

Milieu jaune presents to the viewer a celestial vision, which at once feels universal and deeply personal. The background throngs with the cosmic force of some omnipotent entity made of glowing yellow starlight, encased in swirling vortexes of lavender and pink. To the lower centre, a purple crescent moon rendered with compass-like exactitude rises like an omen over a conservatory dome bathed in daylight, housed behind a proscenium archway one might access via the floating rungs beneath it. These architectural forms conjure a grand temple in an Arcadian realm, immortalised by their constructive frameworks and yet undulating in a rhythmic trance. Indeed, the central diagonal lines seem to evoke successive chords in a symphony, while the alternating colour planes in the nearby pentagon conjure a tinkling melody, anchored by the steady percussion of the short, staccato lines to the upper centre.

These tantalising currents, made tangible through the repeated hints of gateways and ladders, generate an ultimate odyssey of contemplation. The viewer – guided by divine light – is invited to step up into the painterly realm and explore its glimmers of interlinking narratives and settings. The Surreal notion of physically inhabiting an artwork captivated Kandinsky since childhood, as he would later call upon the viewer to 'take a walk' in his paintings, 'to compel him to forget himself, to dissolve himself in the picture' (Kandinsky quoted in W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 31). Concurrently, the resemblance between Kandinsky's semi-circular and oval forms to eyes invokes a sense of omnipotence, as we the all-seeing viewers take stock of the artist's grand design.

This overwhelming sense of gazing upon a primordial universe is a powerful incantation of Kandinsky's abstraction, which was crafted according to 'the totality of natural laws governing the cosmos' (Kandinsky quoted in W. Grohmann, ibid., p. 224). In Paris in the 1930s, Kandinsky's new focus on scientific, biological and cosmic motifs brought that motive to fruition, in the spirit of his friends Paul Klee and Jean (Hans) Arp, as well as Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Indeed, the playful sequence of undulating semicircles to the lower left could convey fairy-tale toadstools, or the interlocking segments of a caterpillar-like entity on the brink of its imminent metamorphosis. In keeping with Kandinsky's ethos of design and precision, an assemblage of logarithmic forms resembling a Fibonacci spiral appears to the lower right, seeming to swell and mutate in a mathematical and existential conundrum. The colossal black shape to the right of centre conjures the bass-heavy hum of a black hole, its polyptoid tendrils embodying the amoebal forms that populated Kandinsky's Paris period. This microscopic imagery, emphasising the most elemental forms of life, offsets the geometry of its surroundings and grants cadence to Kandinsky's optimism in his new chapter of life. The crimson star to the left shimmers with textured phosphorescence, evidence of Kandinsky's fascination with fusing minuscule and cosmic phenomena. Hanging together in a strange harmony, these elements form glyphs enunciating Kandinsky's alchemical vernacular, one that is based on a dialogue between opposites: linear versus organic, free versus exact, order versus chaos.

In refining his biomorphic language, Kandinsky developed a fascination with the illustrations of scientific journals, finding their organic imagery to satisfy his preference for abstractions originating in nature. As Christian Derouet has observed, 'Through the publications of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Kandinsky broke out of the straitjacket geometry had placed on him and reintroduced nature into his plastic investigations' (C. Derouet, 'Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944', in Kandinsky in Paris, exh. cat., New York, 1985, p. 36). Kandinsky had previously encouraged his students at the Bauhaus to fuse science, technology and nature in their approaches to art and design, with records of his 1931 teaching notes including drawings of algae and plankton. In 1934, Christian Zervos wrote, 'the influence of nature on [Kandinsky's] work has never been so perceptible as in the canvases painted in Paris. The atmosphere, light, airiness and sky of the Île-de-France completely transforms the expressiveness of his work.' (C. Zervos, 'Notes sur Kandinsky', in Cahiers d'Art, 1934, p. 154, translated by V.E. Endicott Barnett, in 'Kandinsky and Science: The Introduction of Biological Images in the Paris Period', in Kandinsky in Paris, op. cit., p. 61).

Indeed, Nina Kandinsky has recalled the hours her husband sat at the windows of his Neuilly studio, watching the interplay between the flowering chestnut trees, clouds and plumes of smoke rising from the chimney stacks of the nearby factories at Puteaux (C. Derouet, op. cit., p. 24). The present work's warm, gossamer tones seem indebted to these atmospheric contemplations. Its palette directly correlates to Kandinsky's creative zone, as his studio walls were painted black, white and pink, just as they had been in Dessau. In tandem, Salvador Dalí's Objets surréalistes indicateurs de la mémoire instantanée' (1932), a clipping of which Kandinsky hung in his studio, resonates strongly with Milieu jaune. Dalí's painting possesses a complex continuum of light and colour, depicting an Arcadian environment with delicately rendered geometric motifs that seem to float among the aura of their otherworldly setting. Following Dalí's example, Kandinsky seems to have abandoned logic and narrative in favour of introspection in its purest form, which simmers with the force of his inner gaze.

About the works of his Paris period, Kandinsky's friend and biographer, Will Grohmann, wrote: 'After the romantic chords of the Blaue Reiter period and the classical ones of the Bauhaus period, we now encounter these chords of Baroque richness' (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 228). Kandinsky himself labelled this chapter as 'the Great Synthesis', between knowledge, science and art (W. Kandinsky, 'La Valeur d'une oeuvre concrete', in K.C. Lindsay & P. Vergo (eds.), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol. II, Boston, 1982, p. 827). Indeed, Kandinsky's Paris works embodied a stylistic fusion of the crisp designs of the Bauhaus and the biomorphism of Surrealism, a movement that promoted subconscious transcendence as a paragon of art. An introspective man, Kandinsky's overarching goal was to 'express mystery in terms of mystery' (Kandinsky quoted in W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 9), seeking a perfect synthesis of technique and intuition.

These philosophies led Kandinsky to experiment widely with technique during his time in Paris. Milieu jaune in particular stands as a testament to his fluency with a range of painted media, his mastery of precise draughtsmanship and his expansive use of colour. In it, Kandinsky's iconic mottled, textured surface enhances the intensity of his deftly blended, shifting colours. During this time, he turned toward smooth, matte colour planes, fusing together pastel tones such as pink, lilac and yellow to create ever more complex tonal nuances. This was achieved through complex concoctions of oil paint, tempera, gouache, watercolour and ink, as well as fine sand, a primordial substance that granted shimmering textures and a direct thematic link to Kandinsky's grounding in nature. These tones and media were then harnessed and conducted through shapes that he meticulously defined through his comprehensive preliminary sketches.

The final decade of Kandinsky's life arguably led to his most profound innovations. His Parisian works were extremely sought-after as soon as they were created, achieving high prices and quickly being acquired by the most elite institutions and collections. This particular work boasts impeccable provenance, having been in the collection of Hilla von Rebay after it was with Kandinsky's trusted New York dealer, Karl Nierendorf. Rebay herself was an abstract artist and was the first director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was critical in curating its cutting-edge collection of non-objective art and in facilitating its acquisitions of Kandinsky's work. Consequently, Rebay was key in the establishment of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, wherein the current work was exhibited at Kandinsky's seminal New York retrospective in 1945, on loan from the personal collection of Rebay herself.

Milieu jaune has graced numerous other Kandinsky exhibitions which focused on his Parisian period, demonstrating its core significance within his oeuvre. Such exhibitions have taken place at world-renowned institutions, including Galerie Maeght, Kunsthalle Bern, Staatliche Kunsthalle, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Kandinsky's work influenced countless younger generations of artists, including in particular the Abstract Expressionists, with Frank Stella having lauded Kandinsky's Parisian period for transcending the two-dimensional framework of abstract art and creating an entirely new form of pictorial space (F. Stella, 'Complexité simple-Ambiguïté', in Kandinsky, Album de l'exposition, exh. cat., Paris, 1984, pp. 84-90). It therefore forms a critical chapter in the story of art, one in which this composer of wild visual scores creates a verdant nebula of joyous and expansive vision.