WASSILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944)Milieu jaune signed with the artist's monogram and dated '34' (lower left); signed with the artist's monogram, inscribed and dated 'No. 597 1934 - 'Milieu jaune'' (on the reverse)oil and tempera on panel64.6 x 81.3cm (25 7/16 x 32in).Painted in Paris in March 1934 Footnotes:ProvenanceNierendorf 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.ExhibitedLondon, 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. LiteratureThe 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.
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