Kandinsky's Composition X: meaning, history and the ten Compositions

Composition X is the last of the ten great Compositions by Wassily Kandinsky: an oil on canvas from 1939, measuring 130 x 195 cm (51.2 x 76.8 in), painted in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris. Light, almost fairy-tale-like coloured shapes float on a deep black background. It is in Düsseldorf, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K20).

Here you will find what the painting shows, what that black, so unusual for Kandinsky, means, and the story of the whole series of Compositions, from the first, burnt in the war, up to this one.

What are Kandinsky's "Compositions"?

Kandinsky divided his paintings into three families, and explained this in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). The Impressions arise from something seen or heard in real life. The Improvisations pour out spontaneously, from instinct. The Compositions, on the other hand, are the paintings he cared about most: they arise from a feeling that matures slowly, are prepared with many studies and built up calmly, as a composer builds a symphony.

The word itself comes from music, his great passion. For Kandinsky a painting had to "sound": colours like instruments, forms like notes, the canvas like a score. That is why the title does not describe a subject, only a sequence number.

The ten Compositions, from the first to the last

In his whole life Kandinsky painted only ten Compositions. The first seven came one after another between 1910 and 1913, in the Munich years, when he was inventing abstract painting. Then, over thirty years, only three: one at the Bauhaus, two in Paris.

• Compositions I, II and III (1910): destroyed during the Second World War. We know them only from old black and white photographs. Composition I, for example, belonged to the collector Otto Ralfs of Braunschweig and burnt with his house in the bombing raid on the night of 14 October 1944.
• Composition IV (1911): Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
• Composition V (1911): private collection.
• Composition VI (1913): St Petersburg, Hermitage.
• Composition VII (1913): Moscow, Tretyakov Gallery. For many scholars it is his masterpiece.
• Composition VIII (1923): New York, Guggenheim. This is the geometric Kandinsky of the Bauhaus.
• Composition IX (1936): Paris, Centre Pompidou.
• Composition X (1939): Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

A curiosity: the same museum in Düsseldorf holds both Composition IV and Composition X, that is, the Kandinsky who discovers abstraction and the Kandinsky who closes the series, almost thirty years apart.

When and why Composition X was painted

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939, oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm (51.2 x 76.8 in). Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

In 1933, under pressure from the Nazis, the Bauhaus closed, the school where Kandinsky had taught for eleven years. He and his wife Nina left Germany and settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, in a flat on the boulevard de la Seine. In Germany, meanwhile, his works were being removed from museums and exhibited as "degenerate art".

In Paris abstract art was little loved and it was not easy for Kandinsky to make his way. And yet, in those years, his painting changed once again: the rigid lines of the Bauhaus softened and shapes appeared that recall cells, embryos, tiny organisms, as if seen under a microscope. In 1939, the year he took French citizenship and the year the war broke out, Kandinsky, now over seventy, painted his last Composition. He made no more after it, although he went on painting until his death in 1944.

What you see in Composition X

The first thing that strikes you is the black: it covers the whole canvas, like a night sky. On this background the shapes do not rest on anything; they float. They can be read in three large areas.

Detail: the large brown disc at the top left, full of tiny marks

At the top left there is a large, irregular brown disc, and inside it a shower of fine marks: little arcs, zigzags, small ladders, dots. It looks like a page written in an unknown language, or a constellation seen up close.

Detail: the aqua green circle and the yellow and pink shape, open like a book

Next to it, an aqua green circle with blurred edges, like a moon, and lower down a yellow and pink shape folded like an open book, with lines and a small grid drawn on it. A second "book", smaller and paler, reappears at the bottom right.

Detail: the large central shape, with the yellow sickle, the chequerboard and the coloured ribbons

On the right a large green and brown shape dominates, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, crossed by a chequerboard of small coloured squares and by curved ribbons. At the top, a yellow sickle. At the bottom it ends in a strawberry-red block. All around, everywhere, dozens of coloured small squares fly about, like confetti or stars, together with thin ribbons that tie the shapes to one another. The shapes seem to rise upwards on both sides of the centre of the canvas. The result is a painting full of movement, yet orderly, like an orchestra before a concert.

Composition X: the meaning of the black background

The black is the real surprise. Kandinsky had always loved bright colours, and in Concerning the Spiritual in Art he had described black as the colour of silence, of a nothingness without a future, of what is over. That is why many read the background of his last Composition as a sign of an ending: the end of a series begun thirty years earlier, the end of an era, with Europe going to war.

But you only have to look at the painting to see that it is not a sad picture. It is precisely the black that makes the colours light up: the yellow, the pink, the green seem lit from within, like stained glass. More than mourning, the dark background is an infinite space, a cosmos in which shapes and colours are born and move freely.

The shapes do not depict specific objects, and Kandinsky left no explanation of the painting: the meaning, as in music, is left to the viewer. Some see in the brown disc a shaman's drum, a memory of Kandinsky's youthful travels among the peoples of northern Russia; others see in the coloured shapes the paper cut-outs of Russian folk art. These are evocative readings, but they remain hypotheses.

From Composition VII to X: how Kandinsky changes

Putting the Compositions side by side is like leafing through Kandinsky's life. In Composition VII (1913) everything is a whirl: exploding colours, no sharp outlines, the energy of someone discovering abstraction. In Composition VIII (1923), at the Bauhaus, the compass and the ruler arrive: circles, triangles and precise lines on a light background. In Composition IX (1936), the first in Paris, broad diagonal bands of colour form the backdrop for softer shapes.

Composition X brings it all together: the freedom of Munich, the order of the Bauhaus, the organic shapes of Paris, and immerses them in a black background unlike anything in the other Compositions that have come down to us.

Composition X on Amalfi paper, to hang at home

On a light wall Composition X has an effect few paintings have: the black creates depth, like a window open onto the night, and the colours shine. It looks wonderful with wood, as above this oak sideboard, with natural tones and with modern furniture.

We print it on handmade Amalfi paper made of pure cotton: a thick, matt paper that gives the black a velvety depth, without reflections, and takes the colours softly. Around the image remains the margin with the deckled edges of the handmade process. The sheet measures 42 x 29 cm (16.5 x 11.4 in), in landscape format, and is mounted in a handmade beech frame: 44 x 31 cm (17.3 x 12.2 in) in all. Each print comes with a certificate of authenticity, also on Amalfi paper, signed by the craftsman who printed it.

Why it is not a poster

On glossy paper the black of Composition X becomes a mirror full of reflections and the colours go flat. We chose the oldest paper in Italy.

Where is Composition X?

The original is in Düsseldorf, Germany, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the art collection of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It belongs to the collections of K20, the venue devoted to twentieth-century art, on Grabbeplatz in the city centre, the same one that holds Composition IV. Works in the collection rotate between display, loans and storage: before travelling it is worth checking on the museum's website whether the painting is on view.

If instead you want to see it every day, there is our print of Composition X on Amalfi paper.

To discover the artist's whole journey, also read about Kandinsky's most famous works and our article on Repin, Kandinsky and Malevich: three Russian painters who changed modern art.

Where to hang it, and who to give it to

In the living room, above a sideboard or a sofa, on a light wall where the black stands out like a window onto the sky. In a study or a library, next to wood and books. In the music room, near the piano: Kandinsky thought of his paintings precisely as symphonies. In a modern office, where it brings colour without becoming loud. And as a gift for anyone who loves abstract art, music or design, or for anyone who has already seen Kandinsky in a museum and wants to take a piece of him home.

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