Kochel – Schlehdorf

From late June to late August 1902 a painting class worked its way around the lake at Kochel, in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich, carrying folding easels, small painting boards and paint in metal tubes. Kandinsky ran it. The class belonged to the Phalanx, the artists' association and school he had started in Munich the winter before, and one of the students that summer was Gabriele Munter. This board is roughly the size of a sheet of paper and was painted on one of those outings, looking across the water to Schlehdorf and its monastery. Munter held on to it. When Kandinsky left Germany in 1914 she kept the work he had left behind, hid it through the Nazi years, and in 1957, on her 80th birthday, gave it to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.