Blue Mountain (Der blaue Berg)

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Blue Mountain (Der blaue Berg) is an oil on canvas painted by Wassily Kandinsky between 1908 and 1909, during a pivotal transitional period in his development toward abstraction. The composition centers on a boldly stylized blue mountain flanked by yellow and red trees, with a procession of colorful horsemen crossing the foreground—forms rendered in non-naturalistic hues and schematic outlines that dissolve recognizable imagery into expressive rhythms of color and shape. Kandinsky, born in Moscow in 1866 and trained in Munich, was at this time deeply engaged with the spiritual and emotional properties of color, believing that blue in particular possessed a profound capacity to evoke the infinite and the transcendent. The painting exemplifies the artist's synthesis of Bavarian landscape, Russian folk art influences, and a visionary colorism that would soon carry him toward fully non-objective painting.