Wassily Kandinsky was one of the first artists to experiment with complete abstraction by painting without reference to recognizable objects from the real world. Kandinsky wanted to free the viewer from the visual distraction of seeing a painting, in order to enable them to feel it instead. He considered his paintings analogous to music, and used color and form to elicit the sensations aroused through vibration, pitch, and the duration of sound. Beginning in 1909, he painted a series of works he called “improvisations,” which he described as “chiefly unconscious, for the most part suddenly arising expressions of events of an inner character.”
This painting, once owned by the artist’s partner and fellow painter, Gabriele Münter, was later acquired by Hans Hofmann, a German painter who brought it to the United States when he emigrated in 1932. Hofmann’s own teaching on abstraction was highly influential to the development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.
Wall label, 2021.
