有骑手的画

In 1912 Kandinsky and his friends in Munich published an almanac that put Bavarian votive pictures painted on glass on the same footing as Picasso and children's drawings. He had been collecting those glass pictures since he started spending summers in the alpine village of Murnau, and he learned the craft from a local man who still made them.

This is one of his own attempts at it. It is painted on the back of a small pane, which means the work runs in reverse. The outlines and the highlights go down first, the background last, and nothing can be repainted once it has set. A rider crosses it, the motif he used again and again in those years. The pane is 27 centimetres across, and it stayed with the painter's widow, Nina, whose estate passed it to the museum in Paris in 1981.