Murnau, Top of the Johannisstrasse

In the summer of 1908 Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter discovered Murnau, a small town in the Bavarian foothills, and it changed how he painted almost at once. Looking up the Johannisstrasse, he kept the houses and the climbing street recognisable, but the colour has begun pulling away from them, laid on in flat, heightened patches he had picked up partly from the Fauve painters he saw in Paris a year or two earlier. Within a few years his pictures would drop the street altogether. Munter held on to this small panel through the First World War, after Kandinsky was forced back to Russia, and it reached Madrid only in 1987.