Judgement Day

By 1912 Kandinsky was spending his summers in Murnau, a town in the Bavarian Alps where the churches and farmhouses were full of an old peasant craft: small pictures painted on the back of glass. He collected these folk panels and began making his own, and this Last Judgement is one of them. In these same years he kept returning to the end of the world, to floods and riders and visions of an old order coming apart, while his forms were loosening their hold on real things. Here the trumpets sound and the figures fall, worked in water paint and India ink. The paint sits on the reverse of the pane, so the scene you see is the one he built up backwards, looking through the glass it was made on.