Painting with White Border

In 1912 Kandinsky travelled back to Moscow, the city he had left to become a painter in Germany, and the visit stirred up what he called extremely powerful impressions. Back in Munich he spent about five months trying to get them onto canvas. He made at least 16 studies, moving between pencil, ink, watercolour and oil, before he found what the picture needed, a broad irregular white border running around the edge. The forms inside carry buried memories of Moscow, a charging troika, the lance of Saint George. By 1913 Kandinsky had pushed further than almost anyone toward painting that no longer copied the visible world. One of those preparatory oil studies survives in Washington, at the Phillips Collection.