Murnau – Grüngasse

Kandinsky painted this street in the summer of 1909, in Murnau, a market town below the Bavarian Alps. He was there with Gabriele Muenter, who bought a house in the town that August, and with Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, who came out from Munich. They and several others had founded a new artists' association in Munich that January.

It is a small thing, oil on card, roughly 33 by 45 centimetres. The colour has already pulled away from the place. Yellow walls, blue shadow, a raspberry red laid in between them.

Muenter kept the work Kandinsky left behind in that house when he went back to Russia in 1914, and she still had it through the years when German museums were being stripped of his paintings as degenerate art. In 1957, on her 80th birthday, she gave more than 1,000 of those works, this panel among them, to the city of Munich.