Kochel - Waterfall I

Kandinsky was in his mid-thirties and had been painting for about four years when he made this. He had trained as a lawyer in Moscow, turned down a university post, and moved to Munich in 1896 to start over. In 1900 he was admitted to the Munich Academy, into the class of Franz von Stuck, and in those same summers he was going out to Kochel am See in the Bavarian foothills carrying small boards to paint on. This one is about the size of a sheet of writing paper, and on the back he noted it himself as an oil study of a waterfall. It is in Munich because Gabriele Münter, who met him in 1902 and kept his early work through both wars, handed the bulk of it to the city in 1957.