Trois ovales

By the fall of 1942, Wassily Kandinsky was living in almost complete isolation with his wife Nina, in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The artist had fled Germany in late 1933 due to the deteriorating political situation, as the Nazi party’s attacks on the artistic avant-garde had placed him increasingly under threat. He had watched from afar as his work was denounced and removed from state collections as part of the new government’s program of cultural cleansing, and with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and subsequent Occupation of Paris, Kandinsky made the decision to remain in Europe, confining himself to his modest apartment overlooking the Seine. Nevertheless, within the walls of the small studio space he had made within the former dining room, he continued to work, conjuring fascinating, imaginative compositions, teeming with strange, semi-abstract forms. It was here, surrounded by shelves filled with glass jars containing a rapidly dwindling store of pigments, leftover string, and colored pencils, that Kandinsky embarked upon Trois ovales in October 1942.
Despite his straightened circumstances and the impact of the omnipresent conflict on his daily life, Kandinsky’s paintings from this period contain few indications of contemporary events. Believing his art to be situated “outside space and time,” he instead sought to convey a timeless, spiritual form of abstraction, that resonated with the great, unseen forces of the universe (quoted in W. Grohmann, op. cit., 1959, p. 242). However, the War had brought about a shortage of materials, particularly canvas and pigment, forcing Kandinsky to look for alternative means to complete his compositions. As a result, he began to work on a smaller scale, using pieces of canvas board and colored cardboard he had salvaged, and deploying a variety of mixed-media—including tempera, gouache, pencil and ink—to record his artistic visions. Kandinsky’s compositions became simultaneously more meticulous and spontaneous in the process, rooted in careful planning and forethought, while still retaining an element of the artist’s own uninhibited impulse as he worked to create an intricately balanced interplay of forms.
In Trois ovales, Kandinsky explores a charming array of carefully delineated geometric shapes and capricious, free-floating forms, set against a deep, navy blue ground. The three ovals of the title are arranged in a descending zig-zag formation from the top left corner of the canvas, each one placed atop a series of white lines that suggest platforms or step-like shelves. Filled with a similar, yet unique, internal pattern of colored geometric forms, each of these ovals adopts a different orientation from the next, creating a striking sense of movement as the eye moves from one form to the other. A carefully delineated grid fills the middle of the composition, the alternating lines of orange and white weaving over and under one another in a manner that recalls the threads of a tapestry, the resulting pattern of rectangles and squares occasionally filled by a panel of pigment, from golden yellows to pale oranges, warm browns and soft reds, to lilacs and pinks.
These lighter, more delicate color harmonies were typical of Kandinsky’s paintings from these years—“Paris, with its wonderful (intense soft) light… relaxed my palette,” he wrote to Alfred H. Barr, Director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1936 (quoted in Kandinsky, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, p. 70). In her memoir, Nina recalled that Kandinsky hardly ever used prefabricated paints during this period of his career, but rather “mixed his own palette from various shades,” resulting in nuanced hues that shifted and changed before the eye (quoted in ibid., p. 48). In this way, Kandinsky imbues works such as Trois ovales with a captivating play of richly worked color, each touch of pigment carefully placed to elicit unexpected spatial and illusory effects in the mind of his viewer.