La flèche (The Arrow)

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on cardboard

Kunstmuseum Basel

La flèche (The Arrow) is an abstract painting created in 1943 by Wassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneering figures of pure abstraction in Western art. Painted during the final years of his life in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the work is characteristic of his late Parisian period, in which biomorphic forms with supple, non-geometric outlines coexist with geometric elements, suggesting microscopic organisms while expressing the artist's inner spiritual life. Kandinsky had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after the forced closure of the Bauhaus, and his late works—produced partly under wartime material constraints—reflect a mature synthesis of his earlier lyrical style and the geometric precision of his Bauhaus years. Held in the Kunstmuseum Basel, the painting stands as a testament to the extraordinary creativity Kandinsky sustained until his death in December 1944.