Improvisation No. 7 (Storm)

In 1910 Kandinsky was in Munich writing a book about painting, and part of it was a filing system for his own pictures. Ones that started from something he had seen he called Impressions. Ones built slowly, over months and through studies, were Compositions. The third group, Improvisations, he described as arriving fast and largely unconsciously, out of something interior. He numbered them the way a composer numbers pieces, and this is the seventh, made that same year. He worked it on a sheet of pasteboard rather than canvas, about 70 centimetres tall, and signed and dated it at the lower right. It is in New Haven because of Katherine Dreier, an American painter who bought work like this when almost nobody in the United States would, and who gave her whole collection to Yale in 1941.