La Vie mélangée

Kandinsky is remembered as the man who pushed painting into pure abstraction, but in 1907 he was still years away from that. He was a Russian living abroad, in and around Munich, and here he looks straight back home. The canvas is crowded with figures from an imagined old Russia — a bent grandmother, a beggar, a pilgrim, lovers in the grass, a horseman for Saint George — gathered below the walls of a hill-top kremlin. He painted it not in oil but in tempera, in flat bright patches, drawing on Russian folk prints and the gold-ground icons of his childhood. A Dutch collector bought it the moment it was finished. Its later history runs through Nazi looting and decades of restitution claims before it settled in Munich.