Murnau, paesaggio con torre

In the summer of 1908 Kandinsky, then a 42-year-old painter living in Munich, began spending time in Murnau, a small town below the Bavarian Alps, with the artist Gabriele Münter. The place set something loose in him. The tower on the left here is an ordinary local landmark, the tower of the Pantl brewery, but he lets the hillside dissolve into slabs of violet, yellow and deep green laid on fast and thick. He had been looking hard at Bavarian folk art, especially the bright reverse-glass paintings sold in the region, and at his own memories of Russian icon colour. Landscapes like this were where he began letting the subject fall away, and within a few years he would be among the first painters in Europe to drop recognisable objects altogether.