Munich

Around 1901 Kandinsky was as much an organiser as a painter. That year he joined other artists in Munich's bohemian Schwabing district to found Phalanx, a society that put on its own exhibitions and ran a painting school, and before the year was out he was its president. Alongside all of that he kept making small sketches out of doors, like this one on a board about 24 by 32 centimetres. His studies from these years were usually painted fast in the open air, the colour laid on thickly and often with a palette knife, and the paint here stands up in ridges on the board. The subject is a plain one, a pale house seen over wooden fences through the trees. According to the Guggenheim, houses like this one still stand near the street where Kandinsky first lived when he settled in Munich.