The exhibition which Christian Derouet has organized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum under the title, “Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944,” is the third and final installment in the retrospective series which the museum has devoted to this artist over a period of three years.[1] It differs, however, from its predecessors in one important respect. Unlike “Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914” and “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933,” the present exhibition does not come to us heavily laden with familiar historical associations. The artist of the Munich period is, of course, a celebrated figure—one of the inventors of abstract painting and the author of an important treatise on the subject, Concerning the Spiritual in Art; the founder of the Blaue Reiter group, and a recognized leader of the international avant-garde. The artist of the Russian and Bauhaus years is likewise a well-known personage in the history of the modern movement—a painter, teacher, and theorist who participated in two of the century’s most programmatic efforts to forge a working alliance, first in the Soviet Union and then in Weimar Germany, between modernist aesthetics and revolutionary politics. By comparison with these legendary chapters in the annals of twentieth-century art, the Paris period, which encompasses the last ten years of Kandinsky’s life, has remained a relatively obscure one. It may thus be said to harbor the work of a neglected, if not indeed an “unknown,” artist.

He seemed, in fact, to fit comfortably into none of the factions which governed the