Kochel, Old Kesselbergstrasse

This is a painting board about the size of a sheet of writing paper, 33 centimetres by 24, worked outdoors in the summer of 1902. Kandinsky was then running a small art school in Munich called the Phalanx, and that summer he took his students to Kochel, a village on a lake in the Bavarian foothills, for a painting course. One of them was Gabriele Münter, 25 years old, who had come to Munich because the state academies in Germany still refused to admit women. She and Kandinsky grew close on that trip and lived and worked together for the next decade. The road in the title is the old Kesselberg road, the climb out of Kochel towards the pass. The picture stayed with him all his life, and it reached the museum in Paris in 1981 through the bequest of his widow Nina.