Tunis, the Bay

Gabriele Münter, the painter who travelled with Kandinsky, took a camera to Tunis in the winter of 1904 into 1905. Her photographs from the trip survive, among them a carnival parade with Arab horsemen in the streets of Tunis in March 1905, and on their travels the two of them often took up the same motif in different techniques, sometimes working later from her pictures. This small view of the bay is one of the oil studies he made there. A band of white town runs along the shore, a strip of deep blue-violet water lies behind it, and brown and purple hills close off the far side under a thick grey sky. The bottom third is the part to look at. The green foreground breaks off in a few loose patches, and below them the canvas-covered cardboard shows through, left unpainted.