Autumn

This is Kandinsky long before the abstractions that made his name. In 1902 he was in Munich, in his mid-thirties, having given up a law career in Russia only a few years earlier to paint. That summer and autumn he worked outdoors on small landscape studies, laying colour down quickly with a palette knife, closer to a sketch than a finished picture. Here the season does the work, warm russets and yellows massed against a cooler ground, the paint thick and unfussy. There is no sign yet of the floating shapes and pure colour he would arrive at within a decade. It is the record of a painter still teaching himself out in the open, in the years he was also running a small art school in the city called Phalanx.