Painting with Troika

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in January 1911. It was the year the Blue Rider group formed around him there, a circle of artists who believed that color and form could reach the spirit directly, and the year he published his book arguing exactly that. His canvases were dissolving into loose color and line, right on the edge of pure abstraction. One shape still holds together, though: a troika, the three-horse sled from the Russia he had left behind. It keeps returning in his work of these years, a piece of memory that will not quite come apart while everything around it does. He built and painted the frame himself, so the color would carry past the canvas onto the wood.