Bright Picture

Kandinsky finished this in December 1913 in Munich, with about eight months of that life left to run. He was a Russian subject living in Bavaria, and when war was declared in August 1914 he had to be out of Germany within days. He went first to Switzerland, then back to Moscow, leaving a great deal of work behind with the painter Gabriele Münter, who kept it through two wars and a Nazi ban on such pictures and handed it to Munich's Lenbachhaus in 1957. The canvases of those last Munich months still carry his old subjects, hills, boats, riders, worked so far into the colour and line that they are hard to name, and that year he had also written a memoir setting out how he had arrived there. Solomon Guggenheim started buying Kandinsky in quantity after visiting him at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1930, and this picture went into the collection that became his museum in New York.