Improvisation Deluge

In 1911 Kandinsky painted a picture of the Deluge on the back of a pane of glass, for his own pleasure, he said. For about a year and a half he then tried to turn it into a large canvas, and in a text published in 1913 he admitted that the attempts kept failing. In some he dissolved the figures, in others he went straight to abstract forms, and neither worked. He had been caught, he wrote, by the fact of the Deluge instead of its inner sound. This improvisation is one of the preparatory works from that struggle. Nothing in it is a boat, a wave or a drowning body. There is a large pink mass on the left, dense knots of blue and red, and pale rays cutting across the middle. The big painting that came out of it, Composition VI, is now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and the glass picture that started it all is lost.