Murnau - View over the Staffelsee

In the middle of August 1908 four painters took rooms at the Griesbräu, an inn on the main street of Murnau, a market town under the Bavarian foothills. Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter had come back to Bavaria that year after a long stretch of travelling abroad, and Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin joined them there. They stayed to the end of September and worked at the town constantly. Kandinsky was using small sheets of cardboard he could carry out with him. This one is about 33 by 41 centimetres, looking across the Staffelsee, the lake on the edge of the town. On the back, probably in his own hand, it reads Kandinsky Murnau 1908. Münter kept it, hid it in the cellar of her Murnau house through the Nazi years, and in 1957, on her 80th birthday, handed it to Munich with the rest of what she had saved, more than 80 oil paintings and 330 drawings.