Composition II

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Composition II is one of the earliest and most significant works in Kandinsky's landmark series of ten paintings he designated 'Compositions,' which he considered his most important and carefully premeditated works. The original large-scale canvas, painted in 1910 in Munich, was destroyed during World War II and is known today only through black-and-white photographs and a surviving oil study held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In the study, loosely rendered figurative elements—figures, horses, and landscape forms—are dissolved into dynamic groupings of color and form, reflecting Kandinsky's transition from representation toward pure abstraction. The work embodies his foundational belief, articulated in his 1911 treatise 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art,' that color, line, and composition could express inner spiritual necessity independent of the objective world.