Binz auf Rügen (Twilight)

Around 1903 Kandinsky was in his late thirties and had been a painter for less than a decade. He gave up a university career in law in Moscow at the age of 30, moved to Munich to study, and by the turn of the century was running Phalanx, a Munich exhibiting society with a small painting school attached. The summers went on painting trips, and a handful of these small oils came from the Baltic island of Rügen and the beach at the resort town of Binz. They are worked on cardboard rather than canvas, in thick knifed-on colour, at a size that would fit in a paintbox lid. Nothing in them predicts what he would be doing 10 years later. His widow Nina left this one to the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris in 1981, the city where the two of them had settled in 1933 after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus.