Ajtyrka, la iglesia roja

This small landscape was painted around 1908 on wooden board, at Akhtyrka, a country estate near Moscow where Kandinsky spent his summers. He was already in his 40s and had trained as a lawyer before turning to painting late. The red church, the loose dabs of colour laid on thickly, the light broken into patches, all belong to the years when he still worked from what was in front of him. Within about three years he would make some of the first fully abstract pictures in European art, colour and line answering to nothing outside themselves. Here the colour is still tied to a real building, standing red against the summer green.