Improvisation 19a

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1911, the year he finished On the Spiritual in Art, a short book arguing that colour and form work on a viewer the way sound works on a listener. The Improvisations were that argument carried out on canvas. The Lenbachhaus, which owns the picture, reads the hard blue shapes on the left as a memory of the hills above Murnau, the Bavarian village where he and the painter Gabriele Munter kept a house.

That house is the reason the painting is in Munich. Munter held on to the canvases Kandinsky left behind when he had to leave Germany in 1914, and kept them out of sight through the Nazi years, when his work was pulled from German museums as degenerate. In 1957, on her 80th birthday, she handed about 1,000 of them to the city.