Reciprocal Accords 1942

Wassily Kandinsky made this oil painting, Reciprocal Accords, sometime in his career, and it lives at the Pompidou Centre here in Paris. Kandinsky isn’t telling us what to see; it’s more like he's inviting us to feel. The colour palette is muted, set against this strange sort of milky, pale green and forms which are like musical notes, dancing across the canvas, making it a visual symphony of abstraction. Look at how Kandinsky plays with the paint. It's not about hiding the process but revealing it. The surfaces are flat, and the colours sit next to one another. There’s this one area—a cluster of floating circles, a magenta one surrounded by greens and blues, like planets aligning. It feels buoyant, optimistic, like a little world unto itself. I think it’s like a compositional key to the rest of the canvas. For me, Kandinsky is always in conversation with artists like Paul Klee, who I think also sought to express the invisible through abstract form. The beauty of art is that it doesn't give us all the answers. It asks us to keep looking, feeling, and thinking.