The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 4.55 cm above, 5.23 cm below.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 7.07 cm each side, 4.56 cm above, 5.26 cm below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 29.62 cm for the small sheet, 55.26 × 39.58 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944), La flèche (The Arrow; German Der Pfeil), 1943
- Object
- Oil on cardboard, 41.9 × 57.9 cm. Monogrammed and dated lower left: the K inside an angle, 43. On the back, monogrammed and inscribed No 711
- Held by
- Kunstmuseum Basel, gift of Dr. h.c. Richard Doetsch-Benziger, 1946
- Inventory
- 1989
- Rights
- Marked by the museum as public-domain image data («Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel»). The painting itself is free in Switzerland, the EU and the UK, not yet in the United States – see below
- File
- Kunstmuseum Basel, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The paint runs to all four borders of the museum's file; we print the file whole.
- Source
- Wassily Kandinsky, La flèche, in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Sammlung Online, sammlung.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/de/collection/item/1597, accessed 3 October 2026
The picture Kandinsky made
The ground is a single deep ultramarine, worked to the edges of the card. On it Kandinsky sets out a cast of separate forms, none of them touching the frame: on the left a tall, jointed figure built from triangles and striped panels; in the middle a crescent split into bands of grey, black, wine-red and blue that runs down into a long S; top right a flame-red shape spotted with black squares, its tail breaking into rounded lobes; below it a golden bowl with blue stripes, a pencil-like spike, and a pink harp standing on a stack of small coloured blocks. Between them, exactly in the centre, the arrow of the title: a pale triangle with a curved copper shaft, pointing left.
The museum dates the picture to February 1943. Kandinsky wrote his own catalogue number, 711, on the back; the same number appears in Will Grohmann's monograph of 1958, which reproduces the picture as a plate.
Paris, the last years
Kandinsky left Germany at the end of 1933 and lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine until his death in December 1944. The paintings of these Paris years trade the hard geometry of his Bauhaus period for soft, organic shapes – forms that recall embryos, larvae and microscope slides as much as machines. La flèche belongs to the war years, when he often worked on cardboard rather than canvas.
The picture reached Basel soon after the war. It was with Suzanne Feigel's Galerie d'art moderne in Basel by spring 1945 at the latest, and in 1946 the collector Richard Doetsch-Benziger bought it there and gave it to the museum. In 1981 the catalogue of the Cologne exhibition Westkunst printed it upside down – an easy mistake with a picture that has no horizon, and one the museum still records in its bibliography.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.96×
The museum catalogues the picture at 41.9 × 57.9 cm and serves a file of 6,598 × 4,746 px. Anchored on the catalogued width, as everywhere in this catalogue, that is 113.95 px/cm, or 289 dpi if the picture were printed at original size – just below our floor of 300 dpi, so there is no 1:1 sheet.
At exactly 300 dpi the file carries 55.86 cm of image width, 0.96× the original. That is what the 70 × 50 cm sheet prints, one pixel of the museum's file to one pixel of the print, with no scaling at all: the picture on your wall is about two centimetres narrower than the painting in Basel. The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints it 42.00 cm wide – 0.73× original, with 399 dpi available.
A small wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.3902, the catalogued dimensions give 1.3819, 0.60 % apart. Anchored on the width, the printed height corresponds to 41.65 cm of card instead of 41.9. The museum gives a second height of 41.8 cm for the right-hand edge, so the card is not a perfect rectangle. We note this; we do not stretch the file to close the gap.
What we measured at the edges
Before printing a museum file whole we check that it really is the picture and not the picture plus a photographer's backdrop. Here the ground is dark everywhere, so brightness alone proves little: forty samples along each border, at the outermost pixel row and eight pixels in, give medians of 43 and 44 at the top, 34 and 36 at the bottom, 37 and 39 on the left and 33 and 34 on the right. What decides it is the colour – every sample is blue (red minus blue between −29 and −46), not the neutral grey of a studio ground – and the four corners viewed at full resolution, where brush marks and flecks of lighter paint run right off the edge of the file. Nothing is cut away.
What we are allowed to sell
Kandinsky died on 13 December 1944, so the painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1 January 2015.
The United States is different. For a foreign work first published after 1930, US copyright runs for 95 years from publication, and copyright in works like this one, still protected in their home country in 1996, was restored by US law. La flèche was reproduced as a plate in Grohmann's monograph in 1958, and taking that as the date of publication it remains protected in the US until the end of 2053. We do not sell this sheet into the United States: it is not shipped to US addresses and not offered on Amazon in the US.
At the reproduction level the Kunstmuseum Basel marks this object as public-domain image data and allows it to be shared, used for any purpose – commercial included – and edited, without asking. The painting is a flat work, so in none of our markets does a separate right arise in the photograph. The museum asks that the artist, title and source be named with a link, and that its logo never be used; both are done above. The museum is our source, not our partner. Markets checked: Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom – clear. United States – not clear, not sold.
A note on colour, and one on choosing
Measured from the museum file, downsampled to 240 × 173 px: 99.1 % of the pixels carry colour, and within that blue accounts for 84.2 %, warm tones 12.2 %, violet 3.3 %, green 0.3 %. Raising the saturation threshold to 0.15 and 0.25 moves blue to 85.7 % and 87.6 %. A blue picture by any measure; filed under Paintings and Blue.
Which size: the small sheet is a picture for a desk wall or a stair, read from a metre away. The large one is as close to the painting as the file allows; it wants a wall above a sideboard or a bed.