Landscape with Church (Landscape with Red Spots I)

From August 1909, Wassily Kandinsky and his lifelong companion, the painter Gabriele Münter, spent a number of months every year in a house that they had bought shortly before in Murnau, which lay above the Murnauer Moose and offered a vast panorama over the Wettersteingebirge; the locals soon called in the “Russian House”. For the process of pictorial abstraction he employed, Kandinsky used motifs from this Alp foothill landscape a number of times. Landscape with Church was inspired by a view of the market town of Murnau with its Baroque parish church of St. Nikolaus exposed on a hill. The surrounding houses, a hill nearby and a chain of mountains visible in the distance were transformed by Kandinsky into abstract colored forms which nonetheless evokes this Upper Bavarian landscape. Kandinsky painted a second version of this work, almost identical, just slightly more intensively luminous, today found in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Kandinsky's view of Murnau found a place in the private collection of the poet Karl Wolfskehl in Munich soon after it was finished.