Large study

Kandinsky had lived in Munich for nearly 20 years when, on 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. He held a Russian passport, which made him an enemy alien overnight. Within days he was on a train for Switzerland, and by December he had reached Moscow. This canvas carries the date of that same year, the close of the four-year stretch in which he worked his way out of recognisable subjects and into loose colour and line. The painting later belonged to the widow of his Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden, whose Sturm gallery had been showing him since 1912, and then to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Boijmans in Rotterdam bought it in 1964, when the Guggenheim auctioned off 11 of its Kandinskys.