Improvvisazione 14

Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1910, the year he was finishing the essay that became On the Spiritual in Art, his argument that colour and form could move a viewer the way music does, without describing anything at all. He called this series Improvisations, meaning canvases that came from something inward rather than from a scene in front of him. Look at the preparatory drawing, though, and the subject is still there: two armed horsemen among tall trees, riding toward each other. In the finished painting they have almost dissolved into ridges of black line and blue, just legible if you know to look. He was only a few years from pictures with no recognisable object in them at all.