Munich – Schwabing with St Ursula’s Church, 1908, oil on cardboard, 68.8 x 49 cm 

When Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896, he settled in the city’s Bohemian quarter, Schwabing. Munich was the nation’s art capital, and Schwabing must have seemed the ideal place for a budding artist to settle. 

The painting’s pretty typical of works done at the time. Scant attention is paid to naturalistic colour, and form is reduced to the most basic of shapes while still allowing the viewer to recognize essential motifs. The manner of application of paint derives from a mixture of pointillist technique modified by broader brush patches/ strokes, and the colour much influenced by the Fauves. This is a combination he made much use of after about 1906, though we see clear signs of it developing in still earlier work. 

To the foreground sit what appear to be two groups of people in a garden area, possibly next to water; beyond them, a bridge; and beyond that a townscape with industrial buildings and the church. The sunshine from the left creates shadows on the buildings, as the darkness of the high rise ones contrast the vibrant colours in the foreground and toward the skyline and on the church. The contrast is largely between the pastoral scene in the foreground and the more industrial/ urban to the rear. Nature verses culture, biomorphic form verse rectilinear form – a theme we see him develop repeatedly in the years that follow. 

The strangest thing in the painting, perhaps, is what appears to be a cloud, or smoke coming from a chimney. It seems far too solid, its edges clearly and heavily delineated. It looms like a strange presence above the scene, its form rather peculiar, I think. It hugs the contours of the buildings it touches, rather than continuing behind them. It is an abstract form of its own, perhaps predictive of the black blob to the right of the Lady in Moscow (1912, see Benjamin and Roethel, 434). Perhaps it’s the very amorphousness of smoke/ a cloud that allow Kandinsky to treat it as a new, abstract form quite different from the other motifs in the depicted scene, which – in spite of their abstracted form - resolve rather more comfortably into familiar elements of a view.

Note: When I can't think of anything else to write, I'll open an oeuvre catalogue randomly, and talk about the work it opens on. That's is how this entry was done.