Murnau – Trees in the Snow

Since March 2025 the Lenbachhaus has hung this small board in an exhibition about transience, What Threatens to Disappear Becomes an Image. Its starting point is that whatever ends up in a picture no longer exists, or no longer exists in that form, and that some subjects are fleeting by nature, clouds that keep changing, trees that blossom only briefly, snow that soon melts. The curators add that in a time of climate change a landscape reads less as a pretty view and more as a threatened ecosystem. Here the subject is snow under trees at Murnau, the market town in the Bavarian foothills where Kandinsky worked alongside Gabriele Münter. The museum dates the picture only to 1909 or 1910. It is painted in oil on cardboard, about 33 by 45 centimetres.