Picture with a Black Arch

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Centre Pompidou

Picture with a Black Arch (Mit dem Schwarzen Bogen) is a monumental abstract oil painting created by Wassily Kandinsky in Munich during the autumn of 1912. The composition features three large masses of color—blue, purple, and red—arranged in a triangular formation and unified by a sweeping black arch evocative of the douga, the characteristic yoke of a Russian troika horse harness. The work is considered one of Kandinsky's first fully non-objective paintings, embodying his conviction that color and form could communicate emotional and spiritual meaning entirely independent of representational subject matter—a philosophy he articulated in his landmark essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). Held today in the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it stands as a foundational document of abstract art and of the Der Blaue Reiter movement that Kandinsky co-founded.