Improvisação 19

1911 was the year Wassily Kandinsky was letting the recognisable world dissolve. In Munich he had just finished his book on the spiritual in art, and with the painter Franz Marc he was about to launch the group they called Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider. He borrowed his titles from music on purpose. An Improvisation was meant to be a largely unconscious expression of something inner, the way a musician plays without a score. You can still make out a procession of thin, ghostly figures drifting across the canvas, but they have narrowed almost to bare outlines. Rising on the right is a wall of deep blue, which for Kandinsky was the colour of the spiritual, of everything straining upward.