The Waterfall

In January 1909 Kandinsky and a small circle of artists in Munich founded their own exhibiting society, the New Artists' Association of Munich, and elected him its president. When the group first showed its work that December at a Munich gallery, the local press was almost uniformly hostile. This picture comes from that same year. The subject can still be read. A waterfall drops in a pale band through the right half, a thin dark trunk stands in front of the spray, and rounded hills and bushes crowd in around it. The colours belong to no real valley. Hills turn pink and orange, and a strip of red sky runs along the top. Yale, which owns it, links the scene to the countryside around Murnau, a small town south of Munich, and the palette to the French Fauves, whose work Kandinsky had seen in Paris a few years earlier.