山

In 1908 Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter, the painter he lived with, started spending long stretches in Murnau, a small market town in the Bavarian foothills south of Munich. The mountains there did something to his work. Painted in 1909, this one is already half-loosened from the world. A great mound of colour rises up the canvas, and only slowly do you find the small figures gathered at its foot. He was still a few years from the fully abstract pictures, and you can watch him deciding, here, how much of the real mountain he actually needs. The canvas came to the Lenbachhaus decades later, when Munter gave her hoard of these early years to the city of Munich.