Composition VII

Kandinsky worked on this through the autumn of 1913 in Munich, and the strange thing is how fast the final canvas came. He made more than 30 studies for it over weeks, pencil drawings, watercolours, ink sketches, big preparatory paintings, and then he laid down the finished picture itself in about three days, from the 25th to the 28th of November. It is roughly two metres by three, a storm of colour with no object in it you can name, though scholars trace shapes back to older paintings of his about the Last Judgment and the Flood. He was writing at the time that a painting could work the way music does, straight on the feelings without picturing anything. This was made months before the war that would send him back to Russia, and the revolution that followed would eventually push work like this out of favour there entirely.