Painting with Houses

Kandinsky painted this in 1909, during the years he spent in the Bavarian town of Murnau, where his colour was pulling loose from the things it described and drifting toward the pure abstraction he is now known for. Houses, a hill, a figure are all still legible here, but the paint is louder than the subject. The canvas then had a long second life of its own. A Jewish family in the Netherlands owned it, and in October 1940, five months after the German invasion, it was sold at an Amsterdam auction under the pressure of the occupation and bought by the city's Stedelijk Museum. The heirs spent years trying to get it back. In 2023 it was finally handed to them, and it left the museum walls it had hung on for more than 80 years.