All Saints Day I

In the summer of 1911 Kandinsky was in Murnau, a market town in upper Bavaria, where Gabriele Munter had bought a house two years before. Both of them were collecting Hinterglasmalerei, the local craft of painting saints and votive scenes on the back of a pane of glass, and both had started making it themselves. Kandinsky wrote to Munter that summer that this picture had begun from one of those glass paintings. Its subject is All Saints, the dead getting up out of their graves, and worked into it are a boat with a blue sail and an armoured St George on a white horse, figures he used again and again that year. He painted a second version and a glass version as well. The picture stayed with Munter, who kept the pre-war Kandinskys in the Murnau house through the Nazi years, when such painting could not be shown. On her 80th birthday in 1957 she gave them to the city of Munich, which is how the Lenbachhaus came to hold them.