Kochel, Mountain Meadow

In the summer of 1902 Kandinsky took the students of his Munich painting school, the Phalanx, down to Kochel am See in the Bavarian foothills to work outdoors. He was 36 and six years out of a legal career in Moscow that he had walked away from to learn to paint. Among the students that summer was Gabriele Münter, who became his companion for the next decade and a half. This is one of the small oil studies he made in the field, on cardboard, hardly bigger than a sheet of writing paper. The abstraction he is known for is still about eight years off. His widow Nina left this board, with the rest of what she held, to the Centre Pompidou in 1981.