Vista de Murnau con ferrocarril y castillo

In 1908 Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Münter, his partner, discovered Murnau, a market town in the Bavarian foothills, and the next year she bought a house there. Those Murnau summers are where Kandinsky's colour tore loose from description and began heading toward the pure abstraction he is famous for. This small oil, painted on cardboard in 1909, still holds onto real things: a steam train crossing the middle distance, its smoke trailing back over a line of telegraph poles, with the old castle and the hills behind. But the colours have stopped obeying the objects, and the ground goes orange and green because the picture wants it, not because the field did. The railway had only reached Murnau a few years before, and Kandinsky, a Russian living in Germany, set that brand-new machine into the same frame as the centuries-old castle.