Herbst in Murnau

In the late summer of 1908 Kandinsky came to Murnau, a market town under the Bavarian Alps, with the painter Gabriele Münter, his companion, and two friends, Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. They painted side by side out of a village inn, and that season something broke open, as the four of them began letting color run ahead of description. You can watch it happen here. The near tree burns red while the meadows and far hills are still an ordinary green, as if the picture is caught halfway between recording the autumn and simply enjoying the paint. Kandinsky was a few years yet from his first purely abstract work, and Murnau is where that road began. Münter would soon buy a house in the town the group kept returning to.