Paisagem com manchas vermelhas, n.º 2

Kandinsky painted this in 1913, in the last summers before the First World War pulled his life apart. For years he and the painter Gabriele Münter, his companion, had spent those summers at Murnau, a village below the Bavarian Alps, and the place kept surfacing in his work even as it dissolved into colour. This canvas is nearly abstract, a rush of blues, reds and yellows over a white ground. But it began with Murnau. If you know to look, the pale vertical near the centre is the tower of the village church of Saint Nicholas, elongated and half-melted into the shapes around it. A year later the war broke out. Kandinsky, a Russian in Germany, had to leave the country, and he and Münter never really put their life back together.