Improvvisazione 6 (Africana)

The word African in the title points back a few years, to the winter Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Münter spent traveling in Tunisia in 1904 and 1905. Sketches and memories of the light and the robed figures there surface in this 1909 canvas, where a hooded form and bright bands of color are only just readable as a scene. This is Kandinsky right on the edge of abstraction. That same year, 1909, he was moving between Munich and the Bavarian village of Murnau and had just helped found a breakaway artists' group in the city. He called these looser, feeling-driven works Improvisations, to set them apart from paintings he planned out in advance.