In the forest

In the years around 1900, nostalgia for the armed horsemen of the late Middle Ages was in fashion in German and Russian painting and writing alike. Kandinsky took it up, and in 1914, looking back, he explained why. Past ages, he wrote, since they no longer really existed, gave him a freer hand with the colours he felt inside him, and so he chose the German Middle Ages, which felt close to him in spirit. He drew in museums and in the Munich print room and travelled to old towns, then used what he had gathered quite freely. This small upright panel of 1904 is one result, a lone rider among trees under clouds. It is painted on mahogany, about 26 centimetres tall. On the back Kandinsky called it tempera, while the museum today reads the paint as oil with what may be gouache. Unlike most of the early Kandinskys in the Lenbachhaus, it did not arrive as a gift. The museum bought it in 1957.