Summer Landscape

In the summer of 1909 Kandinsky was living in Murnau, a small market town below the Bavarian Alps, in a house he shared with the painter Gabriele Munter. He had recently seen the work of the French Fauvists in Paris, and here the lesson takes hold. The hills, houses and trees are still recognisable, but the colour has stopped obeying them, laid down in blunt, glowing patches that answer to feeling more than to the view. This is two years before Kandinsky would paint his first pictures with no subject left in them at all.