Wassily Kandinsky

Collection of Gabriele Münter, Murnau, Germany
Wally Findlay Galleries, Palm Beach, Florida
Private Collection, California, USA

J.Hahl-Kokh, Kandinsky, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, p.75 ill.
K.Roethel and J.Benjamin, Kandinsky, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Volume One, 1900-1915, London: Sotheby Publications, 1982, p.122 ill.

Structural Condition The artist's canvas-board is slightly bowed but is providing a secure and stable support and no structural intervention is required or recommended. Paint Surface The paint surface should benefit from cleaning as there is evidence of dirt in the impasto. No retouchings are visible under ultra-violet light. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and while no further work is required for reasons of conservation, cleaning could be considered.
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This lot is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity by Dr Hans K.Rothel, Munich, dated 19 February 1967.

The present work was painted in 1903, only two years after Vasily Kandinsky co-founded the artists' association Phalanx in Munich, during a summer trip with his students to Kallmünz in Bavaria (fig.1). Although the colours are neither as vivid or bright as his later works, the method of application with a palette knife hints at the emphasis placed by his teacher Anton Ažbe, on pure, rather than mixed colours. Another factor in Kandinsky's early artistic development, was undoubtedly the French influence. Upon seeing Monet's Haystacks in Moscow in 1896 Kandinsky wrote: "Suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture... I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking". The freely painted lineature and greater luminescence of colours in his own early oil sketches suggest his first steps towards paintings no longer reliant on references to objects.

These early sketches share a number of compositional idiosyncrasies, for example a diagonal line drawn directly from the foreground to deep into the middle ground, which lends the compositions 'a certain dynamism as well as introducing an element of time'. The slanting sunlight in the offered work provides an extreme contrast between light and dark – a second compositional trope typical of the early oils, inspired, as he recalls in Reminiscences, by the interplay of light and shadow in Rembrandt's paintings. The variety of tones within the shadows and the use of broad patches of colour to undermine the usual conventions of perspective are further characteristics common to this relatively coherent group of oils that reveal the gradual and natural progression of Kandinsky's art towards his goal of abstraction