Scena russa

By 1904 Kandinsky had been in Munich for eight years, and the small artists' association he ran there, Phalanx, closed that year for want of money and members. What he was exhibiting then looked nothing like the abstraction that came later. He painted old Russia, horsemen and wooden towns and processions, in tempera laid over a dark ground, a way of working he had taken up around 1901 in Franz von Stuck's class, where colour put over black stays bright. He had trained as a lawyer in Moscow and left for Germany at 30, and these fairy-tale subjects were what he sent to exhibitions across Europe for a decade. Most of the Kandinskys in Paris came from his widow Nina, who gave 15 works in 1976 and left the rest to the Centre Pompidou when she died in 1981.