Composition VI

In 1913 Kandinsky was in Munich, pushing painting toward pure abstraction faster than almost anyone. This canvas grew out of a picture he had made on glass two years earlier called Deluge, a flood, which he wanted to redo at nearly three metres wide. Then he froze. He had loaded the subject with so much meaning — flood, baptism, destruction and rebirth — that he could no longer paint it. His companion, the painter Gabriele Münter, told him to stop thinking and simply repeat the German word for flood, uberflut, over and over for its sound alone. It worked. After eight months of studies and stalling he finished the huge painting in three days. The glass original is lost, known only from a photograph. This one hangs in the Hermitage.