Winter No. II Study

On the back of this small sheet of cardboard, the painter Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky's companion in these years, wrote in her own hand: Kandinsky study, Winter No 2, 1910. The Lenbachhaus dates it a little more loosely, to the winter of 1910 into 1911, and a pencil sketch in one of Kandinsky's notebooks, dated 31 January 1911, shows him still working out the same winter view of houses and a church.

It is a quick oil study, signed in black at the lower left, the kind of thing a painter keeps rather than sells. And it was kept. When Kandinsky left Germany at the outbreak of war in 1914, much of his work stayed with Münter. Through the Nazi years she hid it in the basement of her house in Murnau, and in 1957, for her 80th birthday, she gave this study and many others to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.