Marketplace

When this little panel was painted, around 1902, Wassily Kandinsky was in his mid-thirties in Munich, running a small art school for a group he had just helped found called the Phalanx. He was more than a decade away from the abstract painting he is now famous for. Here he is still showing you something you can name: a market, a scatter of figures, the open parasols of the stalls, all worked in tempera on a strip of cardboard barely a foot wide. The long, low shape reads almost like a decorative frieze, close to the folk art and design he loved in these years. The work came to Paris much later, left to the Centre Pompidou by his widow Nina.