Rapallo, mare in tempesta

On 23 December 1905 Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Muenter, his companion in those years, moved into a rented house on via Montebello in Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast. They were living out of suitcases, moving between Tunisia, Germany, Italy and France, and he worked in formats small enough to carry, laying the oil on with a palette knife in the open air. The bay below the house supplied motif after motif, boats, grey days, water in every mood. He was 39 and still painting what was in front of him. The Italian light pushed his colour several notes higher than it had been in Germany, and they gave up the house on the last day of April 1906 and moved on to Paris.