Composition J

In the spring of 1916 Kandinsky was in Moscow, kept there by the war, and working mostly in watercolour and ink on paper. Several of these sheets he named with letters of the Russian alphabet rather than words. This one carries Ж, a Cyrillic letter pronounced "zh", which French and English catalogues write as J. Its second title, To the Voice, goes back to a telephone call that May from a stranger, Nina Andreevskaya, who would later become his wife. In September the two met face to face for the first time, at the Museum of Fine Arts on Volkhonka Street, the building that holds this sheet today. A near twin of the composition, made a few months later, is in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This one came to the museum in 1948, when Moscow's Museum of New Western Art was closed down.