Saint George I

Saint George, the knight who kills the dragon, was especially venerated in Bavaria, and his image was everywhere in folk painting there. This little square of glass, under 20 centimetres a side, is one of Kandinsky's earliest versions of him, painted in 1911 and still very close to those village models. Rider and lance make two diagonals that fill the whole square. The saint, in green and gold armour, leans forward on a shying horse of deep royal blue speckled with the knight's gold, and drives his weapon down into the coiled body of the dragon. Behind him are a dark red sky and a round tree, a detail that had already appeared beside riders in Kandinsky's earlier pictures. The Lenbachhaus points out that he pushed the folk painters' unreal colours even further, in the glass and in the painted frame alike. When he and the painter Franz Marc put together their almanac, the book they called The Blue Rider, they included a dozen Bavarian glass paintings among its illustrations.