Moscou I

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian who had been living in Munich, suddenly counted as an enemy alien and had to go home to Moscow. He had spent years there and abroad pushing painting toward pure abstraction, but back in the city he loved, something pulled him partway toward the real again. Moscow I, from 1916, is his portrait of the city's heart. It does not so much describe a square as spin one, domes and towers and crowds flung outward as if you stood turning in the very middle of it. Kandinsky often said the hour of a Moscow sunset, the whole city set glowing, was the sight that first made him want to paint. That memory sits closer to the surface here than in almost anything else he made in these years.