Painting with White Form (study)

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1913 as a stage on the way to a larger, more abstract canvas called Painting with White Form. Here the visible world has not quite gone. In the upper right, the outlines of golden-domed buildings on a steep hillside recall both the Bavarian countryside where he was living and the churches of his native Russia, and the lines crossing the lower right are read as his recurring rider on horseback, leaping toward the blue and white forms. How the canvas came to Detroit is its own piece of history. In April 1938, a year after the Nazi regime began purging modern art from German museums, the Berlin dealer Ferdinand Möller agreed with William Valentiner, the German-born director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, that the museum would store it. It stayed there through the war, and in 1957 Möller's wife, Maria, gave it to the museum.