View of Murnau

In the summer of 1908 Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Munter, who lived with him, went walking in the Bavarian foothills and stopped at Murnau, a market town under the Alps. They stayed, and she bought a house there the following year. What they found in the local churches and farmhouses was reverse glass painting, a peasant craft of flat bright colour laid on the back of a pane, and they began collecting it. This small view, oil on cardboard rather than canvas, comes from that first Murnau season. It reached Moscow in 1929, into the Museum of New Western Art. When Stalin ordered that museum closed in 1948 as a store of formalist art, its pictures were split between Moscow and Leningrad, and this one went to the Hermitage.