Composition V

In 1911 Kandinsky submitted this large canvas to the jury of the artists' association he had helped run in Munich. They turned it down, officially because it was too big to hang. The real objection was to the painting itself, which had let its subject dissolve almost entirely into drifting lines and colour. Kandinsky walked out, and with Franz Marc and Gabriele Munter set up a rival show within two weeks under a new name, Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider. So this is one of the pictures that split a movement. Kandinsky privately called it a Last Judgment, and if you look for it, the trumpet of the apocalypse is still there in the thick black line curving across the upper canvas.