Study for Improvisation V

In 1910 Kandinsky was in Munich finishing a short book, On the Spiritual in Art, which came out at the end of 1911. In it he sorted his own pictures into three kinds, and this title comes from the middle one. An improvisation, he wrote, was a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of an inner state. The subject is still there, if only just. Curators at the Minneapolis Institute of Art read the end of days in it. A woman in blue kneels in the foreground before a tall figure with streaming golden hair, possibly Christ, and further back two horsemen of the Apocalypse leap a fence. He came back to the Last Judgment and the Flood again and again over the next few Munich years. He painted this study on pulp board, and the museum notes that it was cut away from a larger piece of cardboard, with nothing on the back.