Lady Sitting on the Grass

Kandinsky's small Munich painting school, the Phalanx, took its students out of the city in summer to work in the open air, and in 1902 the class went to Kochel, a village at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. The Centre Pompidou records an older title for this little board that names the woman in red. It reads Fräulein Meerson in Kochel, white and red. Olga Meerson was a young Russian painter in that class. A few years later she moved to Paris to study with Matisse, and in 1911 at Collioure the two of them painted each other's portraits. She married Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann, settled in Berlin and died there in 1930, her work largely forgotten. Here she sits in the long grass by the water with her face turned away, painted in thick strokes on canvas-covered cardboard about 32 centimetres high. In 2025 the castle museum in Murnau devoted an exhibition to her.