Lirico

1911 was the year Kandinsky and his friends in Munich formed the Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, and the year he pushed to the very edge of pure abstraction. The rider was his own recurring emblem, a figure of the spirit breaking free of the material world. Here a horse and jockey stretch flat out at a gallop, but he builds them from almost nothing, a few sweeping lines, a couple of flat patches of colour, the legs reduced to quick strokes. You can still read the subject, which within a few years you would no longer be able to do in his work at all. He cut the same image as a colour woodcut that year for his portfolio of prints, Klänge, meaning Sounds.