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Lot Essay
‘Spring is indescribably beautiful here – everything is in bloom,’ Wassily Kandinsky wrote from Paris on 22 April 1939. ‘For its part, nature does everything to create joy. People do everything to spoil it. But we want to remain optimistic’ (letter to H. Beckmann, 22 April 1939; quoted in J. Hahl-Fontaine, ed., Kandinsky: A Life in Letters, 1889-1944, Munich, 2023, p. 243). Though the threat of war lingered on the horizon throughout 1939, Kandinsky remained dedicated to his art, determinedly working on new paintings in the small, make-shift studio in the living room of his apartment on the Seine. Painted that spring, Le rond rouge is a powerful testament to the artist’s perseverance and creative spirit at this time, and captures the vibrancy and dynamism of Kandinsky’s pioneering abstract idiom during this final phase of his career. Throughout his Paris period, he continued to test the boundaries and limits of his imagination, marrying strict geometric form, with fluid, sinuous biomorphic elements, and capricious, free-floating passages of colour, to reach ever more complex and intriguing compositions. In Le rond rouge, these elements are woven together in a richly layered, delicately balanced play of form that is suffused with a powerful internal energy.
Kandinsky and his wife Nina had moved to Paris in December 1933, in order to escape the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Germany. Following Hitler’s rise to power, avant-garde artists, and particularly those associated with the progressive teaching at the Bauhaus, swiftly became targets under the repressive cultural policies of the regime. In April 1933, police and Nazi officials raided the Berlin Bauhaus, where Kandinsky was a teacher, and sealed the premises, forcing the school’s closure. This left the staff with no choice but to terminate their venture for good, and many of the pioneering members of the faculty found themselves adrift, unable to secure new posts elsewhere. After spending the summer of 1933 in Paris and on holiday by the Mediterranean, Kandinsky and Nina began to make plans to relocate from Berlin to the French capital. With the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, they found a modest three-room apartment to rent in a new building at 135 boulevard de la Seine (today the boulevard Général Koenig) in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Situated on the sixth-floor and overlooking the river, this space became a haven for the artist through the ensuing decade, offering him a quiet space to work unhindered.
The Kandinskys took up residence in the new year, shortly after the building was completed, and filled the space with the small collection of belongings and artworks they had brought with them from Berlin. The artist converted the apartment’s living room into a studio, filling it with his easels, canvases, jars of pigment and brushes, a bookshelf crammed with tomes, and a writing desk. As Nina noted in her memoirs, Kandinsky selected just a few favourite icons and reverse glass paintings, known as hinterglasbilder, to adorn the space: ‘he wanted nothing else on the walls of his studio, and certainly not his own creations’ (quoted in C. Derouet and J. Boissel, eds., Kandinsky: oeuvres de Vasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paris, 1984, p. 354). Nothing was to distract him from his current works in progress, so all other canvases were stacked together on the floor and turned inwards to face the wall.
Kandinsky was particularly taken with the room’s large windows, which led on to the small balcony overlooking the river and filled the space with light. Looking westwards over the Seine, he could watch the ever-changing spectacle of the clouds as they danced across the open sky, while smoke from the factory chimneys on the opposite bank drifted slowly upwards, disappearing into the atmosphere. Describing the vista in a letter to Josef Albers written shortly after the move, Kandinsky discussed the endless beauty of this view: ‘From the windows of the three rooms in a row, we look down on the Seine flowing beside the boulevard (‘down’ because we live on the sixth floor), then there’s an undeveloped island, then the Seine again and after that the hills start, which slowly disappear over the horizon. Over that a huge sky. In the evening, the hills look like the night sky with all the lights on’ (quoted in Kandinsky, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, p. 44).
Once settled, Kandinsky took the opportunity to immerse himself in the fervent milieu of the city’s avant-garde circles, determined to continue championing the cause of abstract painting. At a time when modern art was being stifled and supressed in Germany, the freedom of the Parisian art world, its sense of community and the rich, multifaceted opportunities for interaction and connection, proved incredibly stimulating for the artist. He renewed contacts with friends and old acquaintances upon his arrival, including Piet Mondrian and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and met many of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement in person, including Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Man Ray, whose work he knew through the pages of Cahiers d’Art. While his close circle of friends included Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Alberto Magnelli, André Breton, and Christian and Yvonne Zervos, Kandinsky maintained contacts with a wide network of artists, critics and dealers active in the city at this time, regularly attending exhibitions, and contributing articles and essays to a number of periodicals, revues and exhibition catalogues. He was also invited to participate in several important group exhibitions during this period, staged in Paris, London, Lucerne, and New York, cementing his position at the heart of the European avant-garde.
Alongside these activities, Kandinsky continued to experiment and explore, developing a remarkable new artistic vocabulary during these Paris years that offered an intriguing evolution of the strict geometry of his Bauhaus works. Amorphous, embryonic and biomorphic forms, inspired by the artist’s interest in biology and theories of creation, began to infiltrate his compositions. These novel forms took their lead from the illustrations of amoebas, embryos and microscopic biology that Kandinsky had discovered in contemporary text books, encyclopaedias, and scientific periodicals, such as Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms in Nature) and Karl Blossfeldt’s famous photo collection Urformen der Natur (Prototypes in Nature). An array of these publications are visible in contemporary photographs of Kandinsky’s atelier, placed on the shelves in a jumbled mass. Tucked among their pages were strips of paper inscribed by the artist’s hand, flagging particularly intriguing imagery, or concepts that he wished to note down and explore further in his drawings and paintings. While Kandinsky’s fascination with these images can be traced back to the mid-1920s, when he had reproduced illustrations of ‘vegetal forms swimming by means of “flagella”’ in his 1926 treatise Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), and used examples of scientific photography in his teaching at the Bauhaus, it was not until his arrival in Paris that they began to emerge in his compositions with such purpose and intent.
Kandinsky’s interest in the organic and the microscopic had been further stoked during a short summer holiday along the Normandy Coast in 1934, where the artist marvelled at the intense, shifting colours of the landscape and the miniscule life-forms that populated the shoreline. Writing to Will Grohmann about the trip, he explained: ‘I have stored up many impressions, and hope to work well. Especially beautiful is the high and low tide. During low tide, the ocean retreats around 400-450 metres, and you can walk along the floor of the ocean, where, you can observe the lives of tiny, almost microscopic animals in little puddles and in the moist sand… I also opened up a little shell and a long, soft, thin horn emerged… The threatening horn says to me: “Don’t eat me – learn from me!” Which I am in fact doing’ (quoted in M. Baumgartner, A. Hoberg and C. Hopfengart, eds., Klee & Kandinsky: Neighbours, Friends, Rivals, exh. cat., Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, 2015, p. 289). Kandinsky continued to draw on the ‘impressions’ throughout the rest of his career – increasingly stylized iterations of amoebas, underwater animals, invertebrates and diatoms began to emerge in his work, their unusual, otherworldly forms offering him a richly varied set of new visual references to work from.
In Le rond rouge, the references to the natural world are subtle and refined, demonstrating the ways in which Kandinsky absorbed the essential shapes of these microscopic life-forms, and then translated them into his highly intuitive abstract idiom. Here, the sharp linearity of the quadrilaterals, grids and circles within the painting are counterbalanced by a series of flowing, sinuous lines and forms, which appear to move and oscillate within the picture plane. Cutting across the centre of the composition in a diagonal line, a ladder-like element weaves from side to side in gently curving parallel lines, while alongside it, a similarly serpentine linear element, divided into three colours, snakes towards the configuration of shapes that fill the upper left corner. There is a vivid dynamism and freedom to these forms, their organic rhythms bringing a bold sense of lyricism to the picture and drawing the eye in different directions. Kandinsky enhances this effect by playing with the connections between the geometric elements within the composition, allowing different shapes to overlap and abut one another in complex configurations, using unexpected angles and placements to disrupt the precision of these forms.
In the right corner of the canvas, the titular red circle occupies the dominant position, acting as a powerful visual anchor within the scene. In an article written for Cahiers d’Art in 1935, Kandinsky described the power of this precise form when deployed correctly: ‘Red circle – stands fast, keeps its position, absorbed in itself. But it strolls along at the same time, since it would like to secure for itself all other positions – thus, it radiates over all obstacles into the furthermost corner. Thunder and lightning at the same time. A passionate “Here I am.” Wonderful is the circle’ (‘Toil vide, etc.’ in Cahiers d’Art, 1935; reproduced in K.C. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, p. 781). Here, the circle appears to exude an almost cosmic or stellar energy, holding the other elements and clusters of forms in a delicate state of equilibrium and tension.
Perhaps the most intriguing element of Kandinsky’s Parisian years, however, was his highly nuanced examination of colour, which saw him embrace more pastel, or ‘mixed’ tones, including delicate lilacs, subtle mint greens, yellows and peaches, and soft pinks. Kandinsky credited this shift to his experiences in Paris, and particularly the unique quality of light he discovered in the city: ‘Paris with its marvellous (strong-weak) light relaxed my “palette” to such a degree – emerging now were different colours, different forms, quite new, some of which I am using again having used them years earlier’ (letter to Alfred H. Barr, 16 July 1936; quoted in Baumgartner, Hoberg and Hopfengart, exh. cat., op. cit., 2015, p. 288). To capture these specific tones, Kandinsky moved away from prefabricated colours, preferring to mix his own palette from an array of shades, often using powdered pigments to reach the precise hue he was searching for. This resulted in unique colour ranges, which could vary from one corner of a canvas to another.
In Le rond rouge, Kandinsky grounds his forms against a flat black background, allowing the power of the colourful elements to increase, glowing at varying tenors against the deep void. This causes them to assume diverse positions in the illusory space, depending on their brightness, chromatic temperature, size and position in relation to the other areas of colour. As the eye focuses on each of the forms, the space within Le rond rouge seems to shift, with some elements appearing to slowly recede and others moving towards the front of the picture plane, depending on their placement. This effect is further accentuated by the addition of an amorphous, cloud of white paint which winds its way through the composition in an undulating, meandering mass, like a thick cloud slowly dissipating to reveal a hidden world. The borders between this pale, ethereal form and the dark expanse are outlined by two soft lines of blue pigment, one almost an electric, bright hue, the other a subtle, more delicate tone that suggests the visual after-echo of a flash or a flare of light. Rather than a precise, straight line, however, Kandinsky creates a vivid sense of texture along the edge, the pigment laid down in rough, loose strokes of paint, allowing the boundary to change shape and thickness as his brush moved over the canvas.
This sophisticated approach to colour, combined with the dynamic play of biomorphic and geometric forms, imbues Le rond rouge with a striking resonance and power. The painting stayed in the artist’s personal collection until his death, at which point it passed into the possession of his widow, Nina Kandinsky. The artist had bequeathed to Nina not only the paintings and watercolours she liked best amongst his oeuvre, but also those works he felt were particularly representative of his style. This was clearly the case for Le rond rouge – after making its public debut after the end of the War in a solo exhibition of Kandinsky’s work at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris, the painting was among those chosen for an important memorial retrospective dedicated to the artist’s pioneering career at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam during the winter of 1948. With a hundred paintings on view, spanning the full breadth of his oeuvre, the exhibition was a crucial step in securing Kandinsky’s artistic legacy as one of the most influential, inventive and ground-breaking painters of the twentieth century. It was also later featured at the Biennale di Venezia in 1986, where the curatorial theme centred on the connection between art and science.
Le rond rouge remained with Nina Kandinsky until the mid-1950s, at which point it was acquired by the Galerie Maeght. It subsequently entered the esteemed collection of the influential Zurich-based collector Gustav Zumsteg, who had successfully cultivated the growing market for silk among the leading Parisian couture houses following the Second World War. Having first fallen in love with art while living in Paris, where a history course at the Louvre had sparked his interest ‘like a bolt of lightning in my life,’ Zumsteg began acquiring artworks that best represented the diversity and depth of French modernism (quoted in S. Heller Anderson, ‘Food, Fabric, Art: Gustav Zumsteg’s Three Lives’ in New York Times, 16 March 1980, p. 62). A firm believer in the joy and energy art brought to daily life, Zumsteg filled his apartment with these works, and began to install select examples on the walls of the famous Kronenhalle restaurant in Zurich, which was owned by his mother. Zumsteg was also a notable patron of the Kunsthaus Zurich, at one point heading up their acquisitions advisory panel, and later donating artworks and funds to the museum. Le rond rouge was later purchased by the Fridart Foundation, who placed it on long-term loan to the Courtauld Gallery in London, between 2002-2018.
Kandinsky and his wife Nina had moved to Paris in December 1933, in order to escape the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Germany. Following Hitler’s rise to power, avant-garde artists, and particularly those associated with the progressive teaching at the Bauhaus, swiftly became targets under the repressive cultural policies of the regime. In April 1933, police and Nazi officials raided the Berlin Bauhaus, where Kandinsky was a teacher, and sealed the premises, forcing the school’s closure. This left the staff with no choice but to terminate their venture for good, and many of the pioneering members of the faculty found themselves adrift, unable to secure new posts elsewhere. After spending the summer of 1933 in Paris and on holiday by the Mediterranean, Kandinsky and Nina began to make plans to relocate from Berlin to the French capital. With the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, they found a modest three-room apartment to rent in a new building at 135 boulevard de la Seine (today the boulevard Général Koenig) in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Situated on the sixth-floor and overlooking the river, this space became a haven for the artist through the ensuing decade, offering him a quiet space to work unhindered.
The Kandinskys took up residence in the new year, shortly after the building was completed, and filled the space with the small collection of belongings and artworks they had brought with them from Berlin. The artist converted the apartment’s living room into a studio, filling it with his easels, canvases, jars of pigment and brushes, a bookshelf crammed with tomes, and a writing desk. As Nina noted in her memoirs, Kandinsky selected just a few favourite icons and reverse glass paintings, known as hinterglasbilder, to adorn the space: ‘he wanted nothing else on the walls of his studio, and certainly not his own creations’ (quoted in C. Derouet and J. Boissel, eds., Kandinsky: oeuvres de Vasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paris, 1984, p. 354). Nothing was to distract him from his current works in progress, so all other canvases were stacked together on the floor and turned inwards to face the wall.
Kandinsky was particularly taken with the room’s large windows, which led on to the small balcony overlooking the river and filled the space with light. Looking westwards over the Seine, he could watch the ever-changing spectacle of the clouds as they danced across the open sky, while smoke from the factory chimneys on the opposite bank drifted slowly upwards, disappearing into the atmosphere. Describing the vista in a letter to Josef Albers written shortly after the move, Kandinsky discussed the endless beauty of this view: ‘From the windows of the three rooms in a row, we look down on the Seine flowing beside the boulevard (‘down’ because we live on the sixth floor), then there’s an undeveloped island, then the Seine again and after that the hills start, which slowly disappear over the horizon. Over that a huge sky. In the evening, the hills look like the night sky with all the lights on’ (quoted in Kandinsky, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, p. 44).
Once settled, Kandinsky took the opportunity to immerse himself in the fervent milieu of the city’s avant-garde circles, determined to continue championing the cause of abstract painting. At a time when modern art was being stifled and supressed in Germany, the freedom of the Parisian art world, its sense of community and the rich, multifaceted opportunities for interaction and connection, proved incredibly stimulating for the artist. He renewed contacts with friends and old acquaintances upon his arrival, including Piet Mondrian and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and met many of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement in person, including Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Man Ray, whose work he knew through the pages of Cahiers d’Art. While his close circle of friends included Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Alberto Magnelli, André Breton, and Christian and Yvonne Zervos, Kandinsky maintained contacts with a wide network of artists, critics and dealers active in the city at this time, regularly attending exhibitions, and contributing articles and essays to a number of periodicals, revues and exhibition catalogues. He was also invited to participate in several important group exhibitions during this period, staged in Paris, London, Lucerne, and New York, cementing his position at the heart of the European avant-garde.
Alongside these activities, Kandinsky continued to experiment and explore, developing a remarkable new artistic vocabulary during these Paris years that offered an intriguing evolution of the strict geometry of his Bauhaus works. Amorphous, embryonic and biomorphic forms, inspired by the artist’s interest in biology and theories of creation, began to infiltrate his compositions. These novel forms took their lead from the illustrations of amoebas, embryos and microscopic biology that Kandinsky had discovered in contemporary text books, encyclopaedias, and scientific periodicals, such as Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms in Nature) and Karl Blossfeldt’s famous photo collection Urformen der Natur (Prototypes in Nature). An array of these publications are visible in contemporary photographs of Kandinsky’s atelier, placed on the shelves in a jumbled mass. Tucked among their pages were strips of paper inscribed by the artist’s hand, flagging particularly intriguing imagery, or concepts that he wished to note down and explore further in his drawings and paintings. While Kandinsky’s fascination with these images can be traced back to the mid-1920s, when he had reproduced illustrations of ‘vegetal forms swimming by means of “flagella”’ in his 1926 treatise Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), and used examples of scientific photography in his teaching at the Bauhaus, it was not until his arrival in Paris that they began to emerge in his compositions with such purpose and intent.
Kandinsky’s interest in the organic and the microscopic had been further stoked during a short summer holiday along the Normandy Coast in 1934, where the artist marvelled at the intense, shifting colours of the landscape and the miniscule life-forms that populated the shoreline. Writing to Will Grohmann about the trip, he explained: ‘I have stored up many impressions, and hope to work well. Especially beautiful is the high and low tide. During low tide, the ocean retreats around 400-450 metres, and you can walk along the floor of the ocean, where, you can observe the lives of tiny, almost microscopic animals in little puddles and in the moist sand… I also opened up a little shell and a long, soft, thin horn emerged… The threatening horn says to me: “Don’t eat me – learn from me!” Which I am in fact doing’ (quoted in M. Baumgartner, A. Hoberg and C. Hopfengart, eds., Klee & Kandinsky: Neighbours, Friends, Rivals, exh. cat., Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, 2015, p. 289). Kandinsky continued to draw on the ‘impressions’ throughout the rest of his career – increasingly stylized iterations of amoebas, underwater animals, invertebrates and diatoms began to emerge in his work, their unusual, otherworldly forms offering him a richly varied set of new visual references to work from.
In Le rond rouge, the references to the natural world are subtle and refined, demonstrating the ways in which Kandinsky absorbed the essential shapes of these microscopic life-forms, and then translated them into his highly intuitive abstract idiom. Here, the sharp linearity of the quadrilaterals, grids and circles within the painting are counterbalanced by a series of flowing, sinuous lines and forms, which appear to move and oscillate within the picture plane. Cutting across the centre of the composition in a diagonal line, a ladder-like element weaves from side to side in gently curving parallel lines, while alongside it, a similarly serpentine linear element, divided into three colours, snakes towards the configuration of shapes that fill the upper left corner. There is a vivid dynamism and freedom to these forms, their organic rhythms bringing a bold sense of lyricism to the picture and drawing the eye in different directions. Kandinsky enhances this effect by playing with the connections between the geometric elements within the composition, allowing different shapes to overlap and abut one another in complex configurations, using unexpected angles and placements to disrupt the precision of these forms.
In the right corner of the canvas, the titular red circle occupies the dominant position, acting as a powerful visual anchor within the scene. In an article written for Cahiers d’Art in 1935, Kandinsky described the power of this precise form when deployed correctly: ‘Red circle – stands fast, keeps its position, absorbed in itself. But it strolls along at the same time, since it would like to secure for itself all other positions – thus, it radiates over all obstacles into the furthermost corner. Thunder and lightning at the same time. A passionate “Here I am.” Wonderful is the circle’ (‘Toil vide, etc.’ in Cahiers d’Art, 1935; reproduced in K.C. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, p. 781). Here, the circle appears to exude an almost cosmic or stellar energy, holding the other elements and clusters of forms in a delicate state of equilibrium and tension.
Perhaps the most intriguing element of Kandinsky’s Parisian years, however, was his highly nuanced examination of colour, which saw him embrace more pastel, or ‘mixed’ tones, including delicate lilacs, subtle mint greens, yellows and peaches, and soft pinks. Kandinsky credited this shift to his experiences in Paris, and particularly the unique quality of light he discovered in the city: ‘Paris with its marvellous (strong-weak) light relaxed my “palette” to such a degree – emerging now were different colours, different forms, quite new, some of which I am using again having used them years earlier’ (letter to Alfred H. Barr, 16 July 1936; quoted in Baumgartner, Hoberg and Hopfengart, exh. cat., op. cit., 2015, p. 288). To capture these specific tones, Kandinsky moved away from prefabricated colours, preferring to mix his own palette from an array of shades, often using powdered pigments to reach the precise hue he was searching for. This resulted in unique colour ranges, which could vary from one corner of a canvas to another.
In Le rond rouge, Kandinsky grounds his forms against a flat black background, allowing the power of the colourful elements to increase, glowing at varying tenors against the deep void. This causes them to assume diverse positions in the illusory space, depending on their brightness, chromatic temperature, size and position in relation to the other areas of colour. As the eye focuses on each of the forms, the space within Le rond rouge seems to shift, with some elements appearing to slowly recede and others moving towards the front of the picture plane, depending on their placement. This effect is further accentuated by the addition of an amorphous, cloud of white paint which winds its way through the composition in an undulating, meandering mass, like a thick cloud slowly dissipating to reveal a hidden world. The borders between this pale, ethereal form and the dark expanse are outlined by two soft lines of blue pigment, one almost an electric, bright hue, the other a subtle, more delicate tone that suggests the visual after-echo of a flash or a flare of light. Rather than a precise, straight line, however, Kandinsky creates a vivid sense of texture along the edge, the pigment laid down in rough, loose strokes of paint, allowing the boundary to change shape and thickness as his brush moved over the canvas.
This sophisticated approach to colour, combined with the dynamic play of biomorphic and geometric forms, imbues Le rond rouge with a striking resonance and power. The painting stayed in the artist’s personal collection until his death, at which point it passed into the possession of his widow, Nina Kandinsky. The artist had bequeathed to Nina not only the paintings and watercolours she liked best amongst his oeuvre, but also those works he felt were particularly representative of his style. This was clearly the case for Le rond rouge – after making its public debut after the end of the War in a solo exhibition of Kandinsky’s work at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris, the painting was among those chosen for an important memorial retrospective dedicated to the artist’s pioneering career at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam during the winter of 1948. With a hundred paintings on view, spanning the full breadth of his oeuvre, the exhibition was a crucial step in securing Kandinsky’s artistic legacy as one of the most influential, inventive and ground-breaking painters of the twentieth century. It was also later featured at the Biennale di Venezia in 1986, where the curatorial theme centred on the connection between art and science.
Le rond rouge remained with Nina Kandinsky until the mid-1950s, at which point it was acquired by the Galerie Maeght. It subsequently entered the esteemed collection of the influential Zurich-based collector Gustav Zumsteg, who had successfully cultivated the growing market for silk among the leading Parisian couture houses following the Second World War. Having first fallen in love with art while living in Paris, where a history course at the Louvre had sparked his interest ‘like a bolt of lightning in my life,’ Zumsteg began acquiring artworks that best represented the diversity and depth of French modernism (quoted in S. Heller Anderson, ‘Food, Fabric, Art: Gustav Zumsteg’s Three Lives’ in New York Times, 16 March 1980, p. 62). A firm believer in the joy and energy art brought to daily life, Zumsteg filled his apartment with these works, and began to install select examples on the walls of the famous Kronenhalle restaurant in Zurich, which was owned by his mother. Zumsteg was also a notable patron of the Kunsthaus Zurich, at one point heading up their acquisitions advisory panel, and later donating artworks and funds to the museum. Le rond rouge was later purchased by the Fridart Foundation, who placed it on long-term loan to the Courtauld Gallery in London, between 2002-2018.