Murnau – Via del villaggio

In the summer of 1908 Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter went out to Murnau, a market town in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich, together with two other Russian painters they knew, Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. They stayed and painted for weeks, and it was the season Kandinsky's colour came loose from the things it was describing.

In Murnau they also found Hinterglasmalerei, the local folk craft of painting on the back of a sheet of glass, which gives flat bright areas penned inside heavy dark outlines. They bought examples, hung them in the house, and began making their own, and that flatness turns up immediately in the pictures they made there.

This one is painted on cardboard, about 48 by 70 centimetres, in blocks of unmixed colour set down side by side. It hangs at the Kunsthaus Zürich on long-term loan from the collection of Werner and Gabriele Merzbacher.