Ohne Titel (Improvisation III)

Kandinsky had been painting works he called improvisations since 1909, pictures he described as mostly unconscious, sudden expressions of something inner. This one carries the date 1914, his last year in Munich. He was a Russian subject living in Germany, and when the two countries went to war that August he had a few days to get out. He crossed into Switzerland and travelled home to Moscow the long way round, through the Balkans. Behind him in Bavaria stayed a decade of paintings, left with Gabriele Munter, the painter he had lived and worked with since 1902. She kept them through the war and through the years when he stopped answering her letters, and in 1957, on her 80th birthday, she handed most of them to the Lenbachhaus in Munich. This one is painted on cardboard rather than canvas, and it ended up in Los Angeles.