Cuadro con mancha roja

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1914, in the last months before the city stopped being home. He had spent years there pushing colour and line loose from any recognisable subject, and by now a canvas like this one is built from pure relationships — a red mark set against drifting fields of colour, with only faint traces of a world you might name. Then the war came. As a Russian citizen in Germany, he had to leave within weeks, and he went back to Moscow, leaving most of his Munich paintings behind with the artist Gabriele Münter, his former companion. His widow, Nina Kandinsky, gave this work to the French state in 1976.