Improvisation 33 (Orient I)

In 1913, the year before the First World War, Kandinsky kept returning in Munich to the Bible's great scenes of ending and beginning. The Flood, the Last Judgement, the Resurrection and, in this canvas, the Garden of Eden. "Orient" in the title is the old word for the Near East, where Paradise was traditionally placed. He called a picture an Improvisation when it arose, in his words, largely unconsciously and suddenly, from inner feeling. Even so, this one is less abstract than it first looks, and his preparatory studies show the theme behind it. The Stedelijk offers a reading. The long horizontal shape at lower left may be a reclining woman or a couple, and the blue oval a fountain. A tower rises in the background on the left, and the black mass beside it may stand for the disaster to come, the Fall. That same year he took up the theme again in a second canvas, Improvisation 34, subtitled Orient II.