Sketch 3 for Composition VII

On 25 November 1913 a canvas roughly two metres by three was carried into Kandinsky's flat on Ainmillerstrasse in Munich. Gabriele Muenter, the painter he lived with, kept a note of each day's progress and photographed the surface as it filled up, and on 28 November she wrote that the picture was done. Behind those four days lay more than 30 drawings, watercolours and oil studies, and this is one of the larger oils among them, made in the same month. The following summer the war sent Kandinsky back to Russia and most of his Munich work stayed with Muenter. She hid it through the Nazi years in the cellar of her house at Murnau, and in 1957, on her 80th birthday, handed the whole hoard to the city of Munich.