Memory from Venice 3 (Canal)

Kandinsky painted this in 1904, several years before he made his first pictures with no recognizable subject at all. Here he is still looking at the visible world: a Venetian canal, the water, the crowded facades along it, worked in tempera on a piece of cardboard not much larger than a sheet of writing paper. The title calls it a memory, and that is literal. He had visited Venice shortly before and set the scene down afterward from recollection, which is why the buildings soften into flat blocks of color and the reflections carry as much weight as the stone. It is one of a small numbered group of Venice panels he made that year, the third in the set.