Volga Song

In the autumn of 1906, Paris was looking at Russia. The impresario Sergei Diaghilev had filled a dozen rooms of the Grand Palais with Russian art, icons included, for the Salon d'Automne. Kandinsky was living just outside the city that year, and pictures like this one were his own offer to that audience, an old Russia out of legend. Bearded boatmen crowd into long boats with carved, painted prows, oars slant into the dark water, and a town of domes and spires sits on the hill beyond. He painted it in tempera on glossy cardboard, setting pure colours side by side without blending them, much as the Russian illustrator Ivan Bilibin and the stage designer Léon Bakst did. He showed it at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907 under the plain title “Song”, and by 1913 it had become “Song of the Volga”.