Autumn II

Kandinsky was working out a theory of colour when he painted this in 1912, the same ideas he was putting into his book On the Spiritual in Art. The Phillips Collection, which owns the picture, quotes the meanings he gave the colours. Yellow for the last forces of summer in the brilliant foliage of autumn, blue for infinity, green for calm.

Hold those next to the canvas and it starts to read. The scene is an autumn day by a lake near Murnau, the small town in the Bavarian foothills where he spent long stretches of those years. Hills and trees are pared down to tall rounded shapes of yellow, green and deep blue. A green zigzag line runs across the middle, and below it the same colours come back looser and broken up, reflected in the water. Duncan Phillips bought it for his museum in Washington in 1945, the year after Kandinsky died in France.