Pointillé from 1935 typifies the final phase of Wassily Kandinsky’s pioneering career, representing the culmination of the artist’s forty-year rigorous commitment to abstraction and the expressive potential of color and form. Executed two years after he and his wife, Nina, left Germany and settled in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he was to live out the remainder of his life, the present work reveals Kandinsky at the height of his creative powers during a period considered among the artist’s most fruitful.

Having pioneered in the 1910s a lyrical form of abstraction that offered a transcendental, spiritual truth and further refining his aesthetic principles in his subsequent years at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky once again gained a fresh impetus to his art amidst his new environs.

While he did not associate himself with the Surrealist movement that dominated the artistic avant-garde of the French capital, he developed a novel, more organic abstract idiom resulting from his contact with the works of the likes of Jean Arp and Joan Miró, in a departure from the hard-edged geoMetricas l abstraction that had dominated his oeuvre throughout the 1920s. Engrossed in the ideas of nature and natural growth, the artist beginning in 1934 incorporated novel motifs largely related to zoology and embryology. Many of the images that populated works of this period—including the forms akin to deep-sea organisms present in Pointillé—reflect Ernst Heinrich Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur of 1899-1904, in addition to clipped photographs from scientific articles on deep-sea life, such as algae, sea-polyps and plankton, owned by the artist. Dynamically traversing the pictorial surface, the organic forms of the present work imbue the composition with a wonderfully playful and optimistic character. Such an effect is augmented by Kandinsky’s heightening of his vibrant palette with a black support, a technique redeployed from the Jugendstil works of his early career.

Despite the artist’s increased incorporation of forms from the natural world, his imagery did not become a realistic interpretation of figuration. Instead, Kandinsky held steadfast to his Bauhaus principles, emphasizing balance and the harmony of color and spatial relationships as manifested in the methodical arrangement and balanced tonality of the present work. Will Grohmann observes, "The works of the Paris years have been described as expressing a superior synthesis; in Kandinsky’s language, this would mean that they reflect a union of head and heart, of compositional technique and intuition, but also a branching out toward other sensory experiences, particularly toward music, and even a scientific relationship with scientific thinking" (Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Life and Work, London, 1959, p. 227). Vivian Endicott Barnett further elaborates, "The Paris imagery typically reflects an accommodation between the geometry of preceding years and a new vocabulary of organic forms. The triangles, circles and squares that were the basis of Kandinsky’s Bauhaus grammar do not completely disappear but are still alluded to in irregular, fantastic biomorphic shapes. […] Drawing upon imaginary sources that may be rooted in a fauna and flora found under the microscope, on the bottom of the sea and in other environments not ordinarily visible, Kandinsky presents tangible if fantastic fragments of reality. These fragments constitute an independent pictorial world—a world of the artist’s own making that is analogous but not identical to our own" (Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, New York, 1983, pp. 16-17).

During this period, Kandinsky preferred to work on paper far more than on canvas and he considered such works to be fully finished masterpieces, bearing all the hallmarks of his singular abstraction. The ability to skillfully handle graphic media was fundamental to Kandinsky’s conception of the artist. He wrote in 1931 in the Journal des poètes: "to be able to devote oneself to [art], one should be a good draughtsman, have a great sensibility for composition and colours and, most importantly, be a true poet" (quoted in Exh. Cat., Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Wassily Kandinsky: Retrospective, 2001, p. 126).Bearing a distinguished provenance, having belonged to the collects ions of both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Jewish Museum, New York, Pointillé evinces Kandinsky’s profound influence on both his contemporaries and on subsequent generations of artists.