Amazone dans les montagnes

When war broke out in 1914, Kandinsky left Munich, where he had been pushing painting toward pure abstraction, and returned to Russia. The years that followed were strange for him. Cut off from his German life, and soon living through revolution, he made very little of the bold abstract work he is famous for. Instead he turned to small, intimate pieces like this one, a rider in the mountains painted on the back of a sheet of glass. Reverse-glass painting was a folk craft he had fallen in love with years earlier in the Bavarian village of Murnau, where local people made devotional pictures this way. The horsewoman, or amazon, was an image he came back to often, half fairy tale, half memory of a Russia of legends. Working on glass, he had to lay in the finishing touches first and the background last, in reverse.