• This artwork was painted in 1910
• It was painted with oil on canvas
• Dimensions of the painting are 43.3 in by 43.3 in (110 cm by 110 cm)
• It is located in Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany

Up to year 1914 Kandinsky painted 35 “Improvisations”. Even though they came from the unconscious Kandinsky managed to implement elements of the Murnau landscape, such as trees and mountain tops.

Kandinsky considered it was essential that a painting grows out of “internal necessity” and made this a key concept in his theoretical writings; he also made it a guiding principle of his all artistic activities. He believed that a work of art should not be based upon an external model, such as artist’s surroundings; instead, he found it necessary that the decisive factor in the creation of a painting is the inner voice of the artist. The object he depicted in this period came out of pure emotion, forming themselves in artist’s imagination out of colors and forms which grew out of internal necessity. Their uncontrollable subjectivity is encountered by Kandinsky’s inner impressions. Therefore the viewer can only see these paintings as abstract.

The dominating elements of the painting are two steeply rising mountains, whose summits are a rider on a white horse and a church, facing one another. Dimly visible on the left is a group of indistinct figures a crowd of people incorporated into the landscape. A giant figure on the right is also immersed into the landscape forming a luminescent symphony of colors. The interaction between the magical world of images and the overall color combinations formed a window into the fairytale with no objectivity whatsoever. The ambivalence from this painting takes the position of a key on the threshold to Kandinsky’s furious abstract work in the second decade of the 20th century.