Interior (My Dining Room)

This is Kandinsky's own dining room in Munich, painted in 1909. He and the painter Gabriele Münter were living at Ainmillerstraße 36 in the Schwabing district, and their summers in the nearby town of Murnau had just changed how he used colour. You can still read the room, a table laid with a checked cloth, a sideboard, framed pictures on the wall, but the walls burn red and violet and the colour has stopped answering to how things really look. This is the moment just before Kandinsky let go of the subject altogether. Within a year or two he would make his first pictures with no recognisable object in them at all. Much of this early work stayed with Münter, and it is thanks to her that we can see it. She kept it safe through two wars and gave a great group of his paintings to this museum, the Lenbachhaus, in 1957.