チュニス、通り

In December 1904 Kandinsky sailed for Tunisia with the painter Gabriele Münter, his partner, and they stayed about four months. He was 38. He had left a law career in Moscow for painting in his thirties, and he was still working from what was in front of him. Tunis had been under French control since 1881, and he went about it the way a travelling painter did, out in the street with a small board on his knee. This one is barely bigger than a sheet of writing paper. The colour is already carrying more of the picture than the drawing is, five years before he painted anything abstract. His widow Nina left it to the French state in 1981 with the rest of the studio.