Improvisation 13

Kandinsky painted this in 1910, the year he was writing the book published at the end of 1911 as On the Spiritual in Art. He was moving between Munich and the Bavarian village of Murnau, and he had started sorting his own canvases into groups and numbering them. Improvisations, as he defined them, were the ones that came out largely unconsciously, expressions of inner rather than outer nature. Very little of the visible world is left here, but the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, which owns the picture, points out that a horse still lies diagonally across it with a rider leaning far back on its neck. That horseman was the motif Kandinsky returned to most often in these years, and in 1912 it gave its name to the almanac he edited with the painter Franz Marc, Der Blaue Reiter.