Murnau con la iglesia

Around 1908 Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Munter, his companion, discovered the small Bavarian town of Murnau below the Alps, and it became their summer laboratory. Painting its houses and its onion-domed church over and over, Kandinsky watched recognizable things loosen into patches of pure color. By 1910, the year of this picture, he was almost there: the church is still legible, a tower and a roofline, but the hillside around it has become slabs of red, yellow, and blue laid on fast and flat. That same year he was writing the book that would appear as Concerning the Spiritual in Art, arguing that color and form could move a viewer the way music does. His first fully abstract works were only a year or two off.