Clear Air

Kandinsky made this in 1901, and it is a surprise if you know only his later abstractions. He was about 35, freshly settled in Munich after giving up a law career in Russia, and that same year he helped found an artists' group called the Phalanx and opened a small school alongside it. The painting is an ordinary outdoor landscape under a bright, clean sky, built up in thick dabs laid on with a knife, closer to the Impressionists he admired than to anything that broke the rules. Nothing here is radical. It is the work of a late starter still learning his craft, a full decade before he would paint pictures of nothing but color and line. The Phalanx school is also where he met a young student named Gabriele Münter, who would become his companion for years.