A Closer Look:

Cosmic colours

The background throngs with the cosmic force of some celestial entity made of glowing yellow starlight, encased in swirling vortexes of lavender and pink.

The painting’s warm, gossamer tones bespeak the hours Kandinsky sat at the windows of his Neuilly-sur-Seine studio, watching the interplay between the sunlight, clouds and plumes of smoke rising from the nearby factories.

His choice of colour also reflects his studio walls, which were painted black, white and pink, as they had been in Germany.

Music and painting

The connection between music and painting was a lifelong preoccupation for Kandinsky.

The central diagonal lines seem to evoke successive chords in a symphony, while the alternating colour planes in the pentagon above conjure a tinkling melody.

These musical motifs are anchored by the steady percussion of the short, staccato lines overhead.

Organic and linear forms

The colossal black shape resonates with the bass-heavy hum of a black hole, its polypoid tendrils embodying the amoebal forms that populated Kandinsky’s Paris period.

This microscopic imagery, emphasising the most elemental form of life, grants cadence to Kandinsky’s optimism in his new chapter of life.

Kandinsky had previously encouraged his students at the Bauhaus to study algae and plankton in order to fuse science, technology and nature in their approaches to art and design.

The crimson star to the left shimmers with textured phosphorescence, evidence of Kandinsky’s fascination with fusing minuscule and cosmic phenomena.

His alchemical formula was based on a dialogue between opposites: linear versus organic, free versus exact, order versus chaos.

Abstractions in nature

These artistic goals drove Kandinsky to seek out abstractions that originate in nature. This playful sequence of undulating semicircles could convey fairy-tale toadstools, or the interlocking segments of a caterpillar-like entity on the brink of its imminent metamorphosis.

In keeping with Kandinsky’s ethos of design and precision, an assemblage of logarithmic forms resembling a Fibonacci spiral appears to the right, seeming to swell and mutate in a mathematical and existential conundrum.

Architectural forms

Nearby, 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.

Inspiration from Surrealism

The resemblance between Kandinsky’s oval forms to eyes invokes a sense of omnipotence, as we the all-seeing viewers take stock of the artist’s Grand Design.

Each of the work’s tantalising currents, made tangible through the repeated hints of gateways and ladders, generate an ultimate odyssey of contemplation.

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's Milieu jaune will come under the hammer on 19 October. Browse the preview lots of this sale or contact impressionists@bonhams.com for more information.