Paysage avec cheminée d'usine

In 1910 Kandinsky was living in Munich and running the artists' association he had founded a year earlier, whose second exhibition that autumn was torn apart by the local press. His painting was moving quickly towards abstraction, and this is one of the places where you can watch that happen while the subject is still nameable. The thing holding the picture together is the object in its title, a factory chimney, standing up out of a landscape that is coming apart into patches of colour. Upper Bavaria was industrialising fast in those years, and a brick chimney in a view of fields and hills was an ordinary sight rather than an intrusion. In 1930 the New York mining heir Solomon Guggenheim, steered towards modern art by the painter Hilla Rebay, visited Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Dessau and bought a canvas on the spot. He kept buying, and this one entered his foundation in 1941 with the rest of the founding gift.