Munich, English Garden (Lake and Dinghy)

A strip of board about 52 centimetres long and 17 high, painted outdoors in the English Garden, the large public park that runs through the middle of Munich. Kandinsky made a great many of these small oil studies around 1903, laying the colour on in short blocks with a palette knife. He was 37 and had been painting for six years, having walked away from a legal career in Moscow to do it, and he was running a small art school in Munich called the Phalanx, which folded the following year for lack of money. Nothing here is abstract yet. His first pictures without a recognisable subject were still about seven years off. The board travelled with him back to Russia, then to Germany and finally to Paris, and reached the Pompidou in 1981 from the estate of his widow, Nina.