Pond in the Park

Around 1906 Kandinsky had no settled home. He had left Munich with the painter Gabriele Münter, his companion, wintered on the Italian coast at Rapallo, and from that summer rented rooms in Sèvres, just outside Paris, where they stayed about a year. Small oil studies on board like this one were how he kept painting on the move. The Guggenheim groups it with his impressions of places he was passing through, and the park itself is not named. What stands out is the colour. The water is built from blues against bands of ochre and green, laid on with a vigorous back-and-forth of the brush. The study later belonged to Hilla Rebay, the German-born painter who advised Solomon Guggenheim and ran his Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and it came to the Guggenheim with her collection in 1971.