Pastel shards of orange, violet and teal spin around a grey crescent

Dozens of small irregular facets — pink, teal, ochre, violet, coral — are fitted together so that no colour dominates and the eye keeps travelling. Freundlich called this building of a picture from small colour units his 'mosaic' method, learned partly from the stained glass he restored at Chartres. Dated 1938, a year after the Nazis branded him 'degenerate', it is defiantly joyful.

Otto Freundlich (1878–1943) was one of the first European painters to commit fully to abstraction. Born in Pomerania, he settled in Paris in 1908 among the artists of the Bateau-Lavoir, worked on the restoration of the stained glass at Chartres Cathedral, and went on to build his mature paintings from interlocking fields of colour laid down like mosaic tesserae, later co-founding the Abstraction-Création group. In 1937 the Nazi regime singled out his work as 'degenerate', and he did not survive the war. His paintings were gathered by his companion Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss and donated to the Musée de Pontoise, and they have been steadily rediscovered ever since as a cornerstone of early abstraction.

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