Winter Landscape with Church

The Guggenheim dates this small board to the winter of 1910 into 1911, a season when Kandinsky's large canvases were moving so far from their subjects that the riders and hills inside them are hard to find. Here the subject is still easy to read. A church tower stands up pale against a green hillside, with houses bunched beneath it and a blue mountain to the right. The snow in the foreground is laid on thickly in lilac, pink and white, and near the middle a small figure, a dab of red with a blue head, stands in it. The board is only about 33 by 45 centimetres, and the brushstrokes are broad for its size, each one a separate block of colour. His signature, in capitals, runs along the lower right corner.