Ensemble

Painted in April 1934, Ensemble dates from a pivotal moment in Wassily Kandinsky’s oeuvre following his move to France, as the artist began to push his abstract pictorial language in intriguing new directions. Atop a diaphanous, neutral ground, a series of geometric forms appear to float weightlessly, their sharply delineated shapes and rich chromatic patterns granting the composition a lyrical sense of movement. Describing the works he created that year, Kandinsky explained: “I consider both technique and form to be mere instruments of expression, and my stories, furthermore, are not narrative or historical in character, but purely pictorial” (quoted in C. Derouet, “Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944” in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1985, p. 30).
Kandinsky and his wife Nina had moved to Paris as a direct result of the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Germany during the early 1930s. Following Hitler’s rise to power, avant-garde artists, and particularly those associated with the progressive teaching at the Bauhaus, swiftly became targets for the regime. In April 1933, police and Nazi officials raided and closed the Berlin Bauhaus, leaving the school’s staff with no choice but to terminate their venture for good. Combined with rising xenophobia and ongoing attacks against modern painting, this event convinced the artist and his wife that it was time to leave Germany, and quickly. As Nina explained in her memoirs, “In July 1933, we went to the area near Toulon, in France, for our summer vacation. Early in September we spent some time in Paris and it was at the Hȏtel des Saints-Pères that we heard Hitler’s speech… When we went back to Berlin, we had the lease [for a new apartment in Paris] and identification papers with us…” (quoted in ibid., p. 17).
Upon arrival in France, the couple took up residence in a modest, newly-built apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a small suburb to the west of central Paris. Kandinsky converted the apartment’s living room into a studio, reveling in the large windows which filled the space with light and offered views over the Seine. In spite of the difficulties facing him, and the chaos and conflict looming on the horizon, Kandinsky’s eagerness to work was undiminished, and he returned to painting in February 1934. Devoting himself with renewed vigor to his art, he built upon the ideas and formal theories that had occupied him while he was still teaching at the Bauhaus, and began to experiment with new techniques, adding sand to his pigments in some compositions, and varnishing his gouaches in others. Kandinsky gave all his new works titles in French, as if to mark this fresh start, and began to move away from the graphic linearity that had defined earlier canvases, exploring instead a painterly idiom rooted in the natural world.
Kandinsky was fascinated by the illustrations of amoebas, embryos and microscopic biology that he had discovered in scientific text books, encyclopedias, and 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). While his interest in these images can be traced back to the mid-1920s, it was not until his arrival in Paris that these forms began to infiltrate his compositions with purpose and intent. Although Kandinsky remained deliberate about the organization and orientation of his geometric forms, he began to embrace a more fluid, elemental means of expression in his compositions during the opening months of 1934. In Ensemble, this can be detected in the aura-like clouds of color which appear to hug the edges of the ovoid elements, their soft, vaporous forms emphasizing the sharp linearity of the shapes they envelope. As Christan Derouet observed, “It was the amorphous, the unexpected that now tempted him” (ibid., p. 34).
Ensemble was included in an important solo-exhibition of Kandinsky’s work, held at Galerie de Cahiers d’Art in May 1934, the avant-garde gallery founded by Christian and Yvonne Zervos. The artist had contributed to several editions of Cahiers d’Art—the influential journal associated with the gallery—over the years, and the show marked Kandinsky’s re-introduction to the Parisian art scene, allowing him to cultivate contacts with a number of Surrealists, as well as key members of the Abstraction-Création group. In the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, Zervos wrote, “The influence of nature on his work has never been so perceptible as in the canvases painted in Paris. The atmosphere, light, airiness and sky of the Ile-de France completely transforms the expressiveness of his work” (quoted in V. Endicott Barnett, “Kandinsky and Science: The Introduction of Biological Images in the Paris Period,” in ibid., p. 61).