Improvisation 27 (Jardin d'amour II)

In 1913 New York got its first big shock of European modern art at the Armory Show, and among the strangest things on the walls was this canvas, the only Kandinsky in the exhibition. Most visitors had never stood in front of a painting that refused to show recognisable things. Look long enough and embracing couples surface out of the swirling lines, wrapped in serpentine forms, and Kandinsky's subtitle, Garden of Love, points back toward Eden. He had painted it the year before, in 1912, just as he was arguing in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art that colour and form alone could reach the soul without describing the world. One visitor was not baffled. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz bought it out of the show for 500 dollars, the first Kandinsky to enter an American collection.