Large study for a mural for Edwin R. Campbell (Summer)

In the spring of 1914, in the Bavarian market town of Murnau, Kandinsky was painting for a hallway in New York. The client was Edwin R. Campbell, one of the founders of the Chevrolet car company, and the American collector Arthur Jerome Eddy had set up the commission. Campbell sent the measurements by letter. The hall was almost round and broken by three doors, so Kandinsky planned four tall panels, two narrow and two wider. This canvas is a large study for one of the narrow ones. The finished panels were ready that spring, and then the First World War began. They left Europe only in 1916, by way of Stockholm, and were installed in Campbell's building on Park Avenue. All four now hang in the Museum of Modern Art. They are known as Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, names added later by the American scholar Kenneth Lindsay, not by Kandinsky. In this study for Summer, long white shapes reach upward like tentacles, and a black patch with a white opening spreads across the upper third.