Landscape with Rolling Hills

Kandinsky painted this small panel in 1910, during the summers he spent in Murnau, a market town in the Bavarian foothills where he and the painter Gabriele Münter had taken a house. Those summers were a turning point in his work. Out sketching the hills, houses and church towers, he kept letting the colour pull away from the thing it described, until a green slope or a blue shadow was there for its own sake as much as for the landscape. This is one of those experiments: you can still read the rolling hills and the sky, but the paint is already half-free of them. Within a couple of years he would be making pictures with no landscape left in them at all. The board is small, the kind of thing carried outdoors and worked quickly, on the spot.