WASSILY KANDINSKY | Kochel—Gebirglandschaft Mit Tannen (Kochel—Mountains with Firs)

Private Collection
Galerie Resche, Paris (acquired between 1984-88)
Acquired in 1988 by the present owner

The Artist's handlist, no. 6 (as Kochel gory s yelyami)
Paris, Galerie des Tendences Nouvelles, Les Tendences Nouvelles, 1904, n.n.
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kandinsky, 1987, no. 4, illustrated in color in the catalogue 
Tokyo, Fuji Television Gallery, Kandinsky, illustrated in color in the catalogue
Lugano, Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Kandinsky nelle collezioni svizzere, 1995, no. 3, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Hans K. Roethel & Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, 1904-1915, vol. I, New York, 1982, no. 521
Christian Derouet & Jessica Boissel, Kandinsky: Oeuvres de Vassily Kandinsky, Paris, 1984, p. 177
Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolors, Catalogue raisonné, 1900-1912, vol. I, New York, 1992, no. 8, illustrated p. 51

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In the summers of 1902 and 1903, Kandinsky arranged expeditions with his students into the foothills of the Bavarian Alps south of Munich where they could paint from nature (see fig. 1). The first trip was significant for the artist on a personal level as he developed a relationship with one of his students, Gabriele Münter, who would become his companion until 1916. Those years were critical for Kandinsky in other respects, as he began to search for a rapprochement between the two conflicting artistic strains in his mind and work: naturalistic Impressionism and lyric Symbolism (Jugendstil).

Artistic progression in his view was a logical process. “Kandinsky bases his theory about his own artistic development on the principle of ‘natural’ growth. On no account does he wish to give the impression that his art constitutes a radical break with tradition. And it is precisely his repeated assertion that all that is new in art must grow out of what went before which might also be the reason why Kandinsky, much later, during his Bauhaus years, was particularly delighted whenever he came across one of his own works from an earlier period” (Vivian Endicott Barnett & Helmut Friedel, Vasily Kandinsky, A Colorful Life, New York, 1996, p. 17).

Relative to his other plein-air oil studies from this period, the present landscape is larger than most in format but displays the same sensitive orchestration of color and free application of paint, with the palette knife as well as the brush (see fig. 2). “The colours are clearer and the paint handling more assured in the studies painted in Kochel in the summer of 1902 than in earlier works” (ibid., p. 47), and indeed, "jewel-like" is the term most commonly applied to the best of these colorful early landscapes which hint at the artist's onward trajectory towards abstraction.