Paisaje de invierno

Kandinsky painted this in 1909, the year his companion Gabriele Munter bought a house in Murnau, a small town in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich. Locals called it the Russian House. He spent the next few summers and winters there in front of very ordinary motifs, a road, a row of bare trees, a yellow house, letting the colour come loose from the thing it described.

That is the state this picture is caught in. The palette runs to pink, yellow and blue, worked up from the look of snow under a low winter sun, and the forms are still readable, but only just. Two years later he published On the Spiritual in Art and began numbering canvases as compositions with no subject at all.

It is oil on cardboard rather than canvas. It came to the Hermitage in 1948, when the Soviet government closed the Moscow Museum of New Western Art as formalist and divided its holdings between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum.