Mountain landscape with lake

This small panoramic study was painted around 1902, and the interesting part of its life came 40 years later. It stayed with Gabriele Munter, who had been Kandinsky's student and then his partner, and who kept a large part of his early work at her house in Murnau, south of Munich, after the two of them separated.

By the late 1930s that was dangerous property. The Nazi government had branded Kandinsky's painting degenerate and stripped it out of German museums, and Munter kept the pictures out of sight in the cellar of the house right through the war. In 1957, on her 80th birthday, she gave the whole group to the city gallery at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, around 90 oils and several hundred works on paper. The inventory number this one carries, GMS 642, stands for the Gabriele Munter Foundation.