Suite orientale (Arabi III)

By 1911 Kandinsky was in Munich and pushing a canvas as far from description as he dared. That December he and Franz Marc walked out of the artists' association they belonged to, after its jury refused one of his compositions, and started the Blue Rider. The subject here is older than the painting by six years. In the winter of 1904 and 1905 he travelled through Tunisia with the painter Gabriele Münter, sketching in Tunis, Sousse and Kairouan, and he kept going back to those weeks. This is the third canvas he called Arabs. What is left of North Africa in it is mostly rhythm and colour, with the figures dissolved almost past recognition. It is in Yerevan because the National Gallery of Armenia, founded in 1921, filled its Russian rooms from collections nationalised in Moscow and Petrograd.