With Sun

Most of Kandinsky's glass pictures are painted on ordinary flat panes. This one is on ornamental glass, rolled glass with a pattern pressed into its surface, made commercially for uses such as windows. From his Murnau years, 1911 to 1913, only about ten of his glass pictures on such textured panes are known, and scholars have suggested he turned to them partly to set himself apart from the village tradition. The scene is crowded. Two hills carry Russian town silhouettes, three riders gallop uphill beneath a white sun, a couple leans back below them, and on the right a black cloud hangs over a wine-red boat with three rowers. The Finnish art historian Sixten Ringbom linked the domed hill to a passage in Kandinsky's book On the Spiritual in Art, about a great city built by every rule of architecture and mathematics that is suddenly shaken by an immeasurable force, its towers falling and its sun going dark. The museum notes how the bright yellows, reds and blues of the figures are held back by the dirty, mixed white of the hills.