Murnau - View from the window of the Griesbräu

The summer of 1908 pulled Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Munter, his companion then, out of Munich and up into Murnau, a small town in the Bavarian foothills. Two other painters joined them, and for a few weeks the four of them worked side by side, egging each other toward stronger, flatter colour. This is the view from the window of the Griesbrau, the inn where they were lodging. The street, the roofs, the hills behind are laid down in thick slabs of orange, green and blue, the light already less about the real weather over Murnau than about the paint itself. Kandinsky was still a few years short of his first pictures with no subject in them at all. Munter kept this little panel and handed it to the city of Munich decades later.