Improvisation 11

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1910, the year he was pushing painting toward something almost no one had tried. He had begun calling these canvases Improvisations, borrowing the word from music, because he wanted colour and shape to move a viewer the way a chord does, without having to picture anything. Around the same time he was writing his book On the Spiritual in Art, arguing exactly that. Look for a moment, though, and the visible world has not fully dissolved. Writers on the picture point out a sailing boat cutting through waves and a small dog seated on the shore. It sits right on the line between a scene and a pure arrangement of colour, a line Kandinsky would step fully across within the next two or three years.