Improvisation 3

In 1909 Kandinsky was 42, living in Munich, and beginning to sort his own canvases into classes. He called this one an Improvisation, the third, meaning a picture that came from something inward rather than from a view in front of him. He set that vocabulary down in print two years later, in his book On the Spiritual in Art. The same year he helped found a new artists' association in Munich, and Gabriele Munter, his companion, bought a house in Murnau in the Bavarian foothills where he painted through the summers. The rider crossing a bridge here is a figure he kept coming back to, close to Saint George, and the landscape behind him may go back to a stay in Tunisia in 1904. It was shown in Odessa in 1911, at the international salon Vladimir Izdebsky organised there.