Wassily Kandinsky – La flèche (The Arrow), 1943 | Giclée Print

A small arrow – a pale triangle on a curved, copper-coloured shaft – flies across a deep ultramarine ground. Around it float forms that look half like instruments and half like living things: a red, spotted creature trailing tendrils, a striped crescent curling into an S, a ladder-like figure on the left, a harp on a pedestal on the right. Kandinsky painted it in February 1943 at Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris, the year before his death, in oil on cardboard.

He numbered it 711 in his own list and wrote the number on the back. The picture has no up or down that announces itself: in 1981 the catalogue of the Cologne exhibition «Westkunst» printed it upside down, and the museum's literature list still notes the slip.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the museum's own photograph of the painting. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 57.9 × 41.9 cm — oil on cardboard

• 50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — reduced, 0.73× original. Image 42.00 × 30.22 cm.
• 70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.96× original. Image 55.86 × 40.18 cm.

Why this size. The painting is 57.9 cm wide. The museum's photograph holds enough detail for 55.86 cm of image at 300 dpi, the floor we print to, so the large sheet reproduces it pixel for pixel at 96 % of the painting's width – about two centimetres short of original size. The small sheet prints it at three quarters. We do not enlarge files artificially: an upscaled file adds detail Kandinsky never painted, which is why there is no 1:1 sheet.

Not available in the United States. Kandinsky died in 1944, so the painting is in the public domain in Switzerland, the European Union and the United Kingdom. In the United States a work first published after 1930 stays protected for 95 years from publication, and this one is still protected there. We therefore do not ship this print to US addresses.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre, with a small Museartis wordmark in the lower left margin. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944), La flèche (The Arrow), 1943, oil on cardboard.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger