Developing Colour

Studie für Herbstlandschaft mit Booten was executed in 1908 at the beginning of Kandinsky’s journey to abstraction. This crucial period in the artist’s career was played out in the picturesque town of Murnau and the surrounding countryside, south of Munich. Kandinsky was accompanied by fellow painters Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin with whom he had spent the summer painting and exchanging ideas. 

Developing the approach of the Fauves, whose work Kandinsky had seen in Paris in 1905, he adopted their sophisticated use of pure colour. However, the brilliantly coloured Murnau landscapes such as these are characterised by a simplification of forms and fractured perspectives that represent a crucial transition between the artist’s Fauve-inspired early paintings and the momentous works of 1910, which herald Kandinsky’s art of chromatic abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky
Studie für Herbstlandschaft mit Booten, 1908 
30.5 by 39 cm.; 12 by 15⅜ in.
£3,000,000–5,000,000

Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
London | 19 June 2013