Kochel, Lake and Herzogstand

This is a mountain in Bavaria, painted from life in the summer of 1902. The dark mass is the Herzogstand, rising above the lake at Kochel, a village in the foothills of the Alps. Kandinsky was 36 and still an unknown landscape painter. A year earlier he had started an art school in Munich, the Phalanx, which took women students at a time when the academy would not, and that summer he brought his class out to Kochel to paint in the open air. One of those students was Gabriele Münter, who would become his partner and, later, a painter central to the Blue Rider group. He laid the paint on thickly here, much of it with a knife, in broad slabs of colour. Abstraction was still eight years off. The canvas came to Paris much later, given to the state by his widow, Nina.