Group in Crinolines

The hooped skirt called the crinoline had gone out of fashion around 40 years before this was painted. It belonged to the 1850s and 1860s, roughly the decade Kandinsky was born in, and nobody in Munich in 1909 was dressed like that.

He had enough of the present to occupy him that year. In January he helped found a breakaway artists' group in Munich, the New Artists' Association, was made its first chairman, and organised its exhibitions in 1909 and 1910. In August he and the painter Gabriele Münter bought a house at Murnau, a village in the Bavarian foothills, and the landscapes he made there are laid on in hard, unmixed colour.

This is a wide canvas for a garden scene, just over a metre and a half across. The party in it was painted in those same months, out of memory rather than out of a window.