Ville arabe

On Christmas Day 1904 Kandinsky arrived in Tunis with the painter Gabriele Münter, his companion, and stayed on the North African coast for about three months. This view of a walled Arab town comes out of that winter. It is still a recognisable place, sunlit streets and small robed figures, painted years before he gave up the visible subject altogether, yet the flat, glowing patches of colour already carry as much weight as the town they describe. He worked in tempera on dark cardboard, letting the brown board show through between the strokes. Kandinsky had trained as a lawyer in Moscow and taken up painting seriously only in his thirties, after moving to Munich.