Blue Mountain

Kandinsky painted Blue Mountain around 1908, in the small Bavarian town of Murnau where he had begun spending summers and where his color was breaking loose from the real world. A blue mountain rises in the middle, framed by one red and one yellow tree, while riders on horseback stream across the foreground. He kept returning to the horse and rider in these years, part of a private language about a coming spiritual renewal, and the horseman would soon give its name to the group he helped found in Munich, Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider. The forms here are still recognizable, but the color no longer simply describes things. It has started to carry the feeling on its own, a few years before Kandinsky painted his first fully abstract works.