Improvisation 18 (with gravestone)

In 1911 Kandinsky was busy hiding things. That December his book on the spiritual in art was printed in Munich, and he and the painter Franz Marc opened the first Blue Rider exhibition in the city. The Improvisations were where he tested how far a subject could be buried and still be felt, and here the burying is close to literal. Along the lower right edge, three gravestones sit in a smear of dirty grey, and at the left three bent figures hold back from them, an old European motif of the living meeting the dead worked down to almost nothing. The canvas is large, about 1.4 metres tall. It came to the Lenbachhaus in 1957, when Gabriele Münter, who had hidden these paintings in her house at Murnau through the Nazi years, gave more than a thousand of them to Munich for her 80th birthday.