Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle)

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1913, the last full year before the war sent him back to Russia and scattered the Blaue Reiter group he had helped found there. For four years he had been making canvases he called Improvisations, which he described as a largely unconscious expression of inner character. The National Gallery of Art reads the motif here as two sailing ships firing on each other, the masts reduced to thin black lines, with a white towered city tipping over at the upper left. The source is older than any naval news of that year. Apocalyptic imagery from the Book of Revelation runs through his work of this period, floods and horsemen and falling towers. For all the title, the gallery points out that the composition was worked out carefully in advance.