The Neuilly flat where Wassily Kandinsky spent his final decade in exile, painting some 144 canvases in a living room he had converted into a studio. Marcel Duchamp found him the apartment.
The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and Wassily Kandinsky left Germany for France. In 1934 he and his wife Nina moved into a new building on what was then the boulevard de la Seine in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on a high floor — sources give the sixth or the seventh — looking over the river.
Marcel Duchamp is the reason they found it. He told the Kandinskys about the flat, which is a small detail that says a lot about how the exiled avant-garde in Paris actually functioned: not through institutions, which had largely shut their doors, but through people passing addresses to one another.
The working arrangement was domestic and improvised. Kandinsky took the living room of the three adjoining rooms, blocked off the double doors to the smaller one, and shut himself in to work in the larger space with its bay windows. Out of that converted sitting room came roughly 144 paintings and more than 200 watercolours and gouaches between 1934 and 1944 — the biomorphic late style, all floating cellular forms, that is as far from the Bauhaus geometry as the Bauhaus was from his early Munich work.
These were hard years. Abstract painting had few defenders in occupied Paris, materials were scarce, and most of the dealers who might have shown him would not. He died here of a stroke on 13 December 1944, aged seventy-eight, months after the Liberation and before the war ended.
The address needs care. The boulevard de la Seine has been renamed the boulevard du Général-Kœnig, and the old name now points somewhere else entirely — a street inside the Paris 16th, across the river. And Neuilly is not Paris: it is a separate commune, which is why the record sits outside the arrondissement structure.
The Nazis close the Bauhaus; Kandinsky leaves Germany for France.
He and Nina move into the Neuilly apartment, on Duchamp's recommendation.
He paints the late biomorphic works in the converted living room.
Kandinsky dies here of a stroke on 13 December, aged seventy-eight.
At 135 boulevard de la Seine in Neuilly-sur-Seine — now 135 boulevard du Général-Kœnig — from 1934 until his death in December 1944. Neuilly is a separate commune bordering Paris, not part of the city.
Not a separate one. He converted the living room of the flat, blocking off the doors to the adjoining room so he could shut himself in to work.
Marcel Duchamp told the Kandinskys about it.
The boulevard de la Seine was renamed the boulevard du Général-Kœnig. The old name now matches a different street inside Paris, so it should not be used to locate the building.
Lived here · 1934–1944
Kandinsky and his wife Nina moved into the Neuilly flat in 1934, on Marcel Duchamp's recommendation, after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. He converted the living room into a studio and worked there until his death on 13 December 1944.
The Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.