Akhtyrka, Pond in the Park

In the summer of 1917 Kandinsky was newly married and out of Moscow, at a dacha on the old Akhtyrka estate north-east of the city, near Abramtsevo. For six years he had been painting canvases with nothing recognisable in them. Here he went outside with small pieces of unstretched canvas and painted what was in front of him, the pond in the park, the veranda, the neighbouring dacha.

This one is about 30 centimetres across. His son Vsevolod was born that September. In October the Bolsheviks took power and his Moscow property was confiscated, and these little studies travelled with him for the rest of his life. His widow Nina left them to the Centre Pompidou in 1981.