Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1

This is a real address, Burggrabenstrasse in Murnau, the Bavarian town Kandinsky found in 1908 and where he would spend the crucial years up to the First World War. He painted it on the spot, but the houses are barely houses, slabs of pink, green and blue laid down almost for their own sake, with the street still just readable underneath. That was the experiment of these Murnau summers, working out how far color and shape could pull away from the thing in front of him before a picture stopped being a view at all. He was in his early forties and had trained as a lawyer in Moscow before he ever took up paint. Two or three years on, his canvases would keep this color and let the street disappear entirely.