Improvisation No. 29 (The Swan)

1912 was the year Kandinsky's arguments went into print. The Blue Rider almanac he put together with Franz Marc came out in Munich that May, and his book On the Spiritual in Art, issued a few months earlier, was already being reprinted. He was living in Schwabing, the studio district of the city, and working through a run of canvases he called Improvisations, which he defined as largely unconscious, spontaneous records of inner events. This is the 29th of them, and he attached the word swan to it in brackets. It ended up in America with Walter and Louise Arensberg, the collectors whose rooms in New York and later in Hollywood were built around Marcel Duchamp, and who gave everything they owned to Philadelphia in 1950.