构成第四号

By 1911 Kandinsky, a Russian living in Munich, was pushing painting to the edge of pure abstraction, and this large canvas sits right on that threshold. At first it looks like coloured chaos, but the images are still there if you hold on. Those two heavy black lines are the lances of Cossacks. There are horses, riders, a hill topped by a castle, and figures lying at the lower right. Kandinsky was staging a battle, a favourite theme of his in these years, when he half believed the old world was heading for a cleansing storm out of which something spiritual would rise. He wrote his book On the Spiritual in Art the same year. What he wanted was for the colours and lines to strike you directly, the way a chord of music does, before you work out what any of it depicts.