Murnau – Landscape with Rainbow

Kandinsky painted this on a sheet of cardboard in Murnau, a market town under the Bavarian Alps, in 1909. On 21 August that year the painter Gabriele Munter, his companion, bought a house there, and the two of them worked out of it until the war. He was still painting things you can name here, a road, roofs, trees and a rainbow. In 1914 the war sent him back to Russia and he left most of his German work behind with Munter. She kept it. Through the Nazi years, when his painting was officially classed as degenerate, the boards and canvases sat in the cellar of the Murnau house. A curator from the Lenbachhaus in Munich was first allowed to see the whole store in 1956. On her eightieth birthday the following year Munter handed that museum more than a thousand works, 90 oils by Kandinsky among them.