Winter Landscape (1910)

Kandinsky wrote the title and the date on the back of this one himself, in German. Winter landscape, end of 1910. He and Gabriele Münter had bought a house the year before at Murnau, in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich, and the village, its church, the road and the hills behind it turn up in dozens of small pieces like this, painted in oil mixed with wax on cardboard rather than on canvas. Winter was useful to him. Snow cut the motif down to a few shapes and let the colour come loose from the things it was describing, which was the direction he was already moving in. He was finishing the book he had worked at for years, On the Spiritual in Art, which came out at the end of 1911. This board went early to Franz Kluxen, a collector in Münster who was buying his work by 1912, and reached the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard in 1982 as a bequest.