Zubovsky Square

When the war began in August 1914 Kandinsky was a Russian subject living in Bavaria, and he had to leave Germany within days. He reached Moscow by the end of the year, and he had somewhere to go. In 1913 he had commissioned a six-storey block of flats on Zubovsky Square, and in 1915 he moved into a five-room apartment at the top of it. He and his wife stayed there through the war and the revolution, until they left for Germany again in 1921. This canvas, about 42 by 46 centimetres, is the square under that window, the buildings broken into tilted overlapping planes. He painted very little in those Moscow years, and a good deal of what he did paint was the view he actually had, on small canvases and on glass rather than the large abstractions of his Munich decade.