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Artist or Maker: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

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Provenance: Galerie Der Sturm [Herwarth Walden], Berlin, 1916.
Dr Otto Smith Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 1916, and thence by descent; sale, Christie's, London, 23 June 1997, lot 14 (£1,651,500).
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

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Exhibited: Berlin, Galerie Der Sturm, September 1916, no. 6.
Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, 1957, no. 11.

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Literature: W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work, London, 1959, p. 345, no. 595 (illustrated p. 399).
H.K. Rosenthal & J.K. Benjamin, Kandinsky, Catalogue raisonné of the Oil Paintings, vol. I, 1900-1915, London, 1982, no. 317 (illustrated p. 299).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTOR

The landscapes that Kandinsky painted in Murnau between 1908 and 1909 reflect the first full flowering of his art and mark the beginning of the artist's epic pioneering journey into abstraction. The Murnau paintings are the first cohesive group in Kandinsky's work to demonstrate a complete independence from the formative influence of Van Gogh, Gauguin and French Fauvism and to assert the emergence in his work of a new and wholly unique vision. Depicting a small hilltop church nestled beneath the awesome expanse of the Wetterstein and Karwendel Alps, Dünaberg is an exquisite work that with its strange combination of the intimate and the sublime seems to both mirror and evoke the transitional state - hovering halfway between figuration and abstraction - of Kandinsky's art during this period.

It was Kandinsky's discovery of Murnau, when visiting with Gabrielle Münter in the summer of 1908, that was to prove the catalyst for this key development in his art. The small and sleepy town in the Bavarian Alps not far from Munich and perched on the edge of the Staffelsee held an instant appeal for Kandinsky and Münter who after first visiting in June, later joined Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin for a prolonged sojourn in August 1908 and later moved permanently to the area in 1909. The simple rustic life and the vast picturesque expanse of the mountain landscape around Murnau, proved highly conducive for Kandinsky prompting in him both a resurgence of his affection for folk art and inspiring his sense of the "spiritual". Heightening his use of colour to a level of expressionistic intensity and broadening his brushstrokes to the point where each essentially abstract mark of the brush takes on a formal function of its own within the work, Kandinsky's Murnau landscapes grew increasingly abstract. As he wrote in his autobiography of this exciting period, in these Murnau paintings, "I let myself go. I thought little of houses and trees but applied coloured stripes and spots to the canvas...and made them sing out as strongly as I could. Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered in the shadows" (Kandinsky cited in F. Whitford, Kandinsky, London 1967, p. 31).

Combining his belief in the spiritual "sound" (resonance) of colours with the boldness, intensity and simplicity of Russian folk art, Kandinsky's Murnau paintings attempt to go beyond the everyday appearance of things and to evoke a sense of what he believed was an innate spiritual dimension holding the world of outer appearance together. Colour, liberated from its descriptive function and used in a pure and autonomous way became the primary medium through which Kandinsky sought to instill a sense of this emotive and essentially abstract phenomenon in the mind of the viewer. As he wrote in his introduction to the first exhibition of his paintings with the Neue Künstler Vereinigung (The Association of New Artists) in 1909, his "point of departure" was "the belief that the artist, apart from those impressions that he receives from the world of external appearances, continually accumulates experiences within his own inner world. We seek artistic forms that should express the reciprocal permeation of all these experiences - forms that must be freed from everything incidental, in order powerfully to pronounce only that which is necessary - in short, artistic synthesis. This seems to us a solution that once more today unites in spirit increasing numbers of artists" (reproduced in P. Vergo & K. Lindsay (eds.), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, London, 1982, p. 53.)

Dünaberg is a typical and highly evocative example of what Kandinsky began to call at this time hi "Improvisations" from Nature. With its simple but powerful composition highlighting the vast differences in scale offered by the mou individual image of a small intense and conflicting use of variegated blocks of shimmering colour. The warm yellow of the foreground is directly opposed to the cool blue of the evening shadow along the lakeside slope of the mountain range, while the purple of the lake is balanced by a lime green on the left of the painting. In this way a dynamic and essentially abstract balance of colour dominates the painting while still adhering to both the forms and more importantly the overall mood of this evening landscape. Capturing the warm shimmering summer light and contrasting it with the cool blue of the mountain landscape, Kandinsky creates a sumptuous and harmonious conglomeration of colour and form that intensifies the atmosphere of the landscape to the extent that he appears to articulate a specific emotion rather than a scene from nature.

Dünaberg was one of a group of highly important paintings that Kandinsky exhibited at the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin in 1916. Exhibited as part of a one-man show that the gallery's owner Herwarth Walden organised for Kandinsky who was then living in Sweden, Dünaberg was one of the works the artist chose for this show whose purpose was largely to illustrate the artist's path from naturalism to abstraction. Other paintings included in this important exhibition were, Entwurf zu Bild mit weisser Form (Detroit Institute of Arts,) Träumerische Improvisation of 1913 (Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich) and Bild mit rotem Fleck of 1914 (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris).

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