Improvisation 21a

This canvas began as a small picture Kandinsky had painted on the back of a pane of glass, called With Sun. On the glass everything is easy to read: two hills crowned with Russian onion domes, a couple leaning far back, three riders charging up the slopes, the sun above, and on the right a boat with three rowers under a dark cloud. In 1911 he carried the scene onto canvas, blurred every figure and laid a whitish grey over the bright glass colours. Scholars such as Rose-Carol Washton Long have read the result as one of his visions of the end of the world, the sun set against the cloud and the boat fighting the sea. Kandinsky himself described a close relative, Small Pleasures, painted in 1913 and now at the Guggenheim in New York, in much milder terms. He had wanted, he wrote, to let himself go and pour a heap of small pleasures onto the canvas, and the dark cloud added only a fine inner simmering, never a painful note.