Landscape

In the summer of 1903 Kandinsky was still a painting teacher, not yet the man who would help invent abstract art. He took the students of his Munich society, the Phalanx, out to Kallmünz in the Oberpfalz, a stretch of hilly Bavarian country, and they worked in the open air. This small study on paper comes from that trip: quick, loaded strokes, a hillside built from patches of colour rather than drawn lines. He was 37 and had come to painting late, after training first as a lawyer. On that same summer he grew close to one of his students, the painter Gabriele Munter, who would be his companion for the next decade. Abstraction was still years off. The whole thing is barely larger than a sheet of paper, oil laid straight onto board, the kind of rapid outdoor sketch he made by the dozen that season.