View of Moscow from the Window of Kandinsky's Apartment at No. 1, Zubovsky Square

By 1916 the man who had spent a decade in Munich teaching Europe to look at painting without a subject was back in Moscow, painting his own street. When war broke out in 1914, Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, had to leave Germany within days, and he came home to the city he once called his pictorial tuning fork. This small view, worked on cardboard rather than canvas, looks out from his apartment on Zubovsky Square across Moscow rooftops and domes under a heavy sky. There is almost no abstraction in it. He wanted the real city, the light he remembered from childhood, when a Moscow sunset had struck him as the hardest thing a painter could ever hope to catch. He made several such Moscow scenes in these years, some of them sliding back toward pure colour. This one keeps its feet on the actual square below the window.