Cresta blu

Kandinsky had spent years in Munich pushing painting toward pure abstraction, but in 1914, when war broke out, the Russian-born artist had to leave Germany and return home to Moscow. He painted Blue Crest there in 1917, the year of revolution. Look into the storm of colour and shapes begin to come clear, a boat with oars, houses with pointed roofs, church domes, and a horseman galloping up the diagonal, all of it caught in a rising wave of blue that crests near the top. Kandinsky had used that lone rider for years as a private emblem of the spirit charging forward. Within a few more years he would drop these recognizable fragments entirely for the clean circles and grids of his Bauhaus paintings.