Picture with a Black Arch

By the autumn of 1912 Kandinsky, living in Munich, was pushing painting almost entirely free of recognizable things. Here three masses of colour, blue, violet and red, lean toward one another as if about to collide, and a single sweeping black line arcs over them and holds them in place. That arc is not quite as abstract as it looks. Its shape is the duga, the wooden shaft-bow that curves above a harnessed horse in Russia, a memory of the country Kandinsky had left. He built the picture on clashing, unresolved colour the way his friend the composer Arnold Schoenberg was then building music on dissonance. His widow Nina gave it to Paris in 1976, in time for the Pompidou to open with it on its walls.