Kochel cemetery and rectory

Kandinsky painted this in Kochel, a village in the Bavarian foothills, in February 1909, weeks after he and a few friends had founded the New Artists' Association in Munich to show work the established exhibition societies would not take. A churchyard and a priest's house are still plainly there. The colour is already doing more than describing them. He worked on a piece of cardboard about 45 centimetres tall, not on canvas.

In 1914 the war sent him back to Russia and he left hundreds of paintings from his Munich years with Gabriele Münter. She held on to them through the 1930s, when his work was being taken down from German museum walls, and in 1957, on her 80th birthday, she handed the whole hoard to the city of Munich. That is how this small board came to the Lenbachhaus.