Improvisation Gorge

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus

Improvisation Gorge is a large-scale oil painting on canvas executed in 1914 by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian-born artist widely credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. The work belongs to his celebrated series of "Improvisations," which Kandinsky described as chiefly unconscious, spontaneous expressions of inner experience, and is characterised by bold interlocking passages of blue, yellow, red, green, and purple, with sharp lines and freely applied colour coexisting in a dynamic, near-non-representational composition. Kandinsky developed this language of pure colour and form through his engagement with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the influential Munich-based avant-garde group he co-founded in 1911, and through his theoretical writings, notably Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), in which he argued that colour and form could communicate emotion independently of recognisable subject matter. Completed in Munich in the final months before the outbreak of World War I forced Kandinsky to return to Russia, Improvisation Gorge stands as one of the last major works of his pivotal German period and is now held in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.