Woman in Moscow

In 1912 Kandinsky was living in Munich, writing his book on spiritual abstraction and pushing his own canvases toward pure colour and line. Yet here he turned back to the Moscow of his childhood, the city he called the root of everything he did. A woman in a rose-coloured dress stands in a busy street with her small dog, a carriage passing behind and the domes of the city crowded around her. Above her hovers a dark grey blot that swallows part of the scene, an ominous shape no one has fully explained. He made it the same year his most abstract works were leaving the recognisable world behind, one of the last times he let a real street stay a street.