Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula

In September 1908, after years of travelling, Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter took a flat together in Schwabing, the artists' quarter on the northern edge of Munich. This was one of the first pictures he painted there, a view of the new neighbourhood where the old city thinned out into open ground. The Lenbachhaus calls it Munich – Outside the City, and in English it is usually named after the church of St. Ursula, Schwabing's parish church. The paint goes on in heavy, wavy strokes of royal blue, green, yellow and red, with the deepest blue gathered in the sky. That summer in Murnau, Alexej Jawlensky had passed on what he had seen of the French Fauves in Paris, and the debt shows. Kandinsky later wrote that in studies like this he let himself go, thought little about houses and trees, and made the colours sing as loudly as he could.