Esquisse pour «Composition II»

Kandinsky made this in 1910 as a study for a far larger canvas he called Composition II. That big final version hung in Germany until the Second World War, when it was destroyed, so this oil sketch is now the closest thing we have to a picture that no longer exists. Even at this size you can read what he was after, a cataclysm crowded into one side of the canvas, riders and toppling forms, and a calmer paradise of salvation on the other. He was pushing hard toward pure abstraction here, letting colour and shape carry the feeling while the horses and hills half dissolve into it.