Kochel - The Bridge

In the summer of 1902 Kandinsky took his painting class out of Munich and south into the Bavarian foothills, to Kochel am See, a village under the mountains about 70 kilometres away. He was 36 and ran the school himself, an association called Phalanx that he had helped found the year before and that, unusually for Germany at the time, accepted women as students.

This is one of the studies made outdoors over those weeks, a bridge over the water, thickly painted and about 32 by 47 centimetres. Nothing in it announces the man who would spend the following decade taking recognisable objects out of painting altogether. The Phalanx school itself did not last. It closed in 1904, short of students and short of money, and Kandinsky went back to painting full time.