Spring, Near Augsburg (Frühling, Umgebung von Augsburg)

Painted in 1902, Frübling, Umgebung von Augsburg comes from the period immediately after Kandinsky had abandoned a career in law to study painting in Munich under Franz von Stuck at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. He was in his mid-thirties, technically accomplished but not yet radicalized, and he spent considerable time painting in and around the Bavarian countryside, producing landscapes that absorbed the lessons of Jugendstil and the Munich Secession while pushing toward a more visceral handling of paint. This work predates by several years the founding of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (1909) and the Blaue Reiter group (1911), the movements through which Kandinsky would transform modern art entirely; yet it is precisely in paintings like this one that scholars trace the embryonic logic of his later color theory. The choice of an unglamorous suburban subject, a working outbuilding heaped with winter's residue, reflects the influence of Post-Impressionist painters such as Cézanne and the early Van Gogh, both of whom Kandinsky had encountered in reproduction and in exhibitions during the same years. Works from this early Bavarian period are held in institutions including the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, which houses the most significant collection of pre-abstract Kandinsky anywhere in the world.