The Spectators

In 1903 Kandinsky was living in Munich and leading Phalanx, an artists' association he had co-founded, which also ran its own painting school. That year he cut a small woodcut called The Spectators, roughly the size of a postcard. This tempera of 1903 to 1904 carries the same title on a sheet nearly 80 centimetres wide. He painted it on tinted paper, later mounted on cardboard, the dark kind of ground he used for many of his tempera pictures in these Munich years. The Centre Pompidou catalogues the scene as a crowd of men, women and children at an open-air performance at night. Kandinsky signed it in white paint at the lower left. Both the tempera and the woodcut came to the Pompidou in 1981, in the bequest of his widow, Nina Kandinsky.