Capricious Forms

Playful, amoeba-like forms - curving, spotted, biomorphic shapes - drift across a softly colored ground, light and whimsical rather than geometric. Wassily Kandinsky painted Capricious Forms in his final Paris years, when his earlier hard-edged Bauhaus geometry gave way to these floating, organic, almost microscopic creatures. Now in the Guggenheim, it shows the pioneer of abstraction in a late, lyrical mood - the rigorous grids and circles loosened into a buoyant, dreamlike dance of invented organisms, as if the founder of pure abstract painting had discovered a whole imaginary biology adrift in colored space.