Sans titre

For a long time this sheet was described as the first purely abstract picture ever made. Kandinsky signed it and marked it 1910, and a large claim rests on that date, that a Russian painter in Munich, and no one else, first cut a picture loose from recognisable things. The trouble is the picture itself. Its washes of colour and darting pen lines match his work of about 1913, and it reads like a study for his large canvas Composition VII from that year. Many scholars now think Kandinsky added the earlier date afterwards, to secure his place as the inventor of abstraction. He cared a great deal about being first, and there were several other painters working toward the same idea at the same moment.