Landscape with yellow field

When this was painted in 1905, the man who made it had not yet painted a single abstract picture, and would not for about another five years. Kandinsky was in his late 30s. He had given up a settled career in Moscow to come and study art in Munich, and these were his traveling years, moving through Holland, Italy and Tunisia with the painter Gabriele Münter. What he brought back were small landscapes on board like this one, often worked with a palette knife, the color laid on in bright separate touches under a strong southern light. Here the subject is still perfectly plain, a field of yellow under an open sky. Even so, those knife-marks of pure color already sit a little loose from the field they describe. The picture is now in Munich, in the Lenbachhaus, part of the large group of his work that Münter gave the city in 1957.