Paysage avec deux peupliers

1912 was the year Kandinsky's Blue Rider almanac appeared in Munich, edited with the painter Franz Marc, and his book On the Spiritual in Art was being read. He was spending long stretches at Murnau, a market town below the Bavarian Alps, painting the same hills and houses until they broke into flat patches of red, green, yellow and blue. Two poplars still stand up out of the field. Within a few years the canvas was in Chicago. Arthur Jerome Eddy, a lawyer there who had bought Duchamp and Picabia straight off the walls of the Armory Show in 1913, was the first American to collect Kandinsky, and he wrote one of the first American books arguing for this kind of painting. His widow and son gave his collection to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931.