Desfiladero

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1914, in the last months before the war sent him back to Russia. By then he was pushing his canvases toward pure color and line, but this one still holds fragments of the real world that set it off. It grew out of a trip to a steep Alpine gorge, and buried in the swirl you can still find traces of a couple in Bavarian dress, oars, and falling water. He called works like this Improvisations, borrowing the term from music, to mean something felt rather than planned. The full title he gave it keeps the source in plain sight, Improvisation. Gorge.