機関車のあるムルナウ

Kandinsky spent the years around 1910 mostly in Murnau, a market town in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich, where he and the painter Gabriele Münter had bought a house on the slope above the village. He was writing as much as painting. His book On the Spiritual in Art appeared in Munich in December 1911, arguing that colour could act on a viewer the way music does, without having to describe anything. This canvas comes from those months. Nearly everything in it has gone over into white and pale blue, and the one thing that stays completely legible is the small locomotive at the left, pulling across the frozen valley with a smear of dirty brown smoke behind it. The railway was how he and Münter reached Murnau from the city. The Saint Louis Art Museum, which owns it, also records the title Winter Landscape.