Painting with Green Center

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Art Institute of Chicago

Painted in Munich in 1913, Painting with Green Center is a fully abstract oil on canvas in which Kandinsky orchestrates a dynamic field of interlocking forms, bold contour lines, and vivid color — anchored by a green passage near the composition's center from which the work takes its name. There is no representational subject; instead, color and form function as independent expressive vehicles, evoking sensation and inner experience rather than depicting the material world. Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter and art theorist who had settled in Munich in 1896, was at this moment a leading figure of the Der Blaue Reiter movement and among the foremost pioneers of pure abstraction in Western art. The painting belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection, one of the earliest and most significant assemblies of Kandinsky's work to enter an American public institution.