Study for Schwarz und Weiss, first painting

In 1909 Kandinsky was still a year or two short of the paintings that would make his name as a pioneer of abstraction. That year he helped found a new artists' association in Munich and was elected its president, and he was also writing for the theatre. This small gouache is a design for the opening scene of a stage piece he called 'Black and White,' one of several stage compositions in which he tried to fuse colour, sound and movement into a single wordless performance. There is almost no plot in them in the usual sense. Shapes and colours were meant to work on the audience the way music does. Like his other stage pieces from these years, 'Black and White' was never actually produced, and it survives mainly in studies like this one, worked out in gouache on cardboard.