Tableau avec forme blanche

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1913, his last full year there. When the war began the following summer he was a Russian subject living in Germany, had to leave within days, and made his way back to Moscow by a long detour. A good deal of what he had made in Munich stayed behind. The canvas belongs to the run of large pictures from just before that break, in which the landscape motifs he started from have almost dissolved into colour and line. It is owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1975 the two museums arranged an exchange, and it travelled to The Hague with a second Kandinsky while two early Mondrian still lifes went the other way. It has hung in the Dutch museum ever since.