Landscape with Red Spots

Soon after Kandinsky finished this canvas in 1913, it was already in Munich, in the collection of Karl Wolfskehl, a poet at the centre of the city's literary life. The subject is easier to find once you know where to look. The pale, stretched shape rising through the middle is the tower of Saint Nikolaus, the Baroque parish church of Murnau, a market town south of Munich, standing on its hill. Around it the houses, a nearby slope and a chain of distant mountains have become patches of colour, and the red spots of the title gather close to the foot of the tower. Kandinsky painted the view twice that year, and the second canvas, larger and a little more luminous, is now in Venice. The Museum Folkwang in Essen had lost much of its modern art to Nazi confiscation in 1937, and it bought this first version in 1962 with help from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.