Works by Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky gave up teaching law at 30 to paint in Munich, and his pictures travel from landscapes and town views to colour and line that describe nothing at all.

A haystack by Claude Monet, seen in Moscow in 1896, unsettled him: he could not make out the subject, yet the colour stayed with him. By 1908 he was working in Murnau, a small Bavarian town, in flat fields of hot colour. In The Blue Mountain a blue peak sits between a yellow tree and a red one, and the riders at its foot are a few strokes of single colours. Landscape near Murnau with a Locomotive shrinks the train to a dark strip trailing white puffs under a cloud that fills half the sky.

He sometimes used musical terms, calling his most spontaneous pictures improvisations and the more elaborate ones compositions; impressions start from something seen. In Impression III (Concert), from 1911, a black wedge hangs over a crowd drawn as black arcs, and yellow floods the right half. The cannons in Improvisation No. 30, he wrote, probably came from that year's war talk, but its true content was what one experiences under the effect of its forms and colours.

Teaching at the Bauhaus from 1922 until 1933, he turned to circles, angles and straight lines, and called the circle the calmest of shapes. The two-metre Yellow-Red-Blue of 1925 sets an upright yellow block on the left against a deep blue disc on the right, with black lines and tiny checkerboards between. The paintings below cover both ends: landscapes and town views, then abstraction.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Lenbachhaus, Art Institute of Chicago.