Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Kandinsky met Gabriele Münter in 1902 when Münter was a student in his class at the Phalanx art school. In the summer of 1903, Kandinsky took his painting class to the Upper Palatinate of eastern Bavaria, where he painted a number of small landscapes in and around Kallmünz, including the present work, which he gave to Münter. Park im Herbst exemplifies the important relationship between Kandinsky's early work and the Neo-Impressionist work of Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings Kandinsky had greatly admired at the 1903 Munich Secession. Under this influence, Kandinsky's use of the palette knife to apply his paint in thickly worked and textured strokes infuses his paintings with an expressive weight of colour that, in its immediacy and simplicity, seems to be on the point of breaking down his rigorously constructed composition, anticipating the artist's move towards abstraction.