Tache noire I

In 1912 Kandinsky published a small book in Munich called On the Spiritual in Art, arguing that colour and shape could move a viewer the way music does, without picturing anything at all. He painted this the same year, and it is one of the works where he steps closest to that idea. There are still faint traces of a world here, a suggestion of a hill, of small figures, but they are dissolving into pure colour and collision. The black spot of the title sits like a knot the eye keeps returning to. Kandinsky had left Moscow for Munich years earlier, and this was made just before the coming war would send him back east to Russia. It hangs now in Saint Petersburg, in the country he had gone away from.