Small Pleasures

Kandinsky finished this in Munich in June 1913, about a year before the First World War scattered his life. He was pushing painting toward pure abstraction, yet look closely and older images survive in the swirl. There are horsemen on a hill, a walled town with onion domes, a small boat, and what may be a cannon. These were his recurring signs of upheaval and a coming reckoning, drawn partly from the Book of Revelation. In 1913 that sense of impending crisis hung over much of Europe. When war broke out the next summer, Kandinsky, a Russian living in Germany, had to leave for Moscow almost overnight, and the free experiments of these Munich years came to an abrupt stop.