Autumn in Bavaria

In the middle of June 1908 Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter made a short trip to Murnau, a market town below the Bavarian Alps. They liked it enough to come back later that year with the painters Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, and the four of them lodged at the Griesbrau inn and worked on the same hills side by side. Kandinsky was 42. This is oil on paper rather than canvas, the sort of thing carried out in the morning and brought back the same day, and the Murnau work of that autumn is where his colour begins to come loose from the things it describes. In January 1909 the circle around them became a formal association of Munich artists with Kandinsky as its first chairman. The sheet reached Paris in 1981, bequeathed by his widow Nina.