Improvisation 28 (zweite Fassung)

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1912, the same year he was arguing, in his book On the Spiritual in Art, that painting should move people the way music does, without needing to picture anything. He had been listening to the composer Schoenberg, whose new music broke the old rules of harmony. So the colours and slashing black lines here are meant to strike you like sound. It is not fully abstract, though. Hidden in the swirl are things Kandinsky put there on purpose: a boat and waves suggesting a great flood on one side, a couple and a calmer paradise on the other, catastrophe giving way to renewal. He was reaching for a spiritual rebirth through this near-chaos two years before the First World War began.