Southern

In 1920 the young picture gallery in Astrakhan, a port town on the Caspian, took delivery of modern paintings sent down from Moscow by the Museum Bureau, the Soviet office that bought contemporary art and spread it across provincial collections. Kandinsky was working inside that system himself. Among the pictures was this canvas, painted in 1917, while he was living in Moscow and moving between landscape and half-abstraction. The gallery points to the motifs that keep returning through his Russian years, a boat and a fish, folded into the forms. It belongs to a small run of canvases from that year titled for moods rather than places. The painting has stayed in Astrakhan ever since, roughly 1,300 kilometres from the studio where it was made.