Composition (1916)

Kandinsky made this small watercolour in 1916, in the middle of a war that had pulled his life apart. As a Russian citizen living in Munich he had become an enemy alien the moment the fighting began in 1914, and he left Germany within weeks, giving up the home and the circle of painters he had built there and parting from his companion Gabriele Munter, who stayed behind. On this sheet he keeps doing the thing he had spent years arguing for, letting colour and loose floating shapes carry feeling with no recognisable object to lean on, the way music does. He worked it in watercolour on a piece of paper only about a hand's width across, small enough to carry in a coat.