Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)

Kandinsky W. Improvisation 11. 1910

The painting is one of the series of Improvisations that Kandinsky produced between 1909 and 1914. The title alone reveals associations with a work of music, to which the artist assigned an extraordinarily important place in his oeuvre. Like the majority of Kandinsky’s abstract works, Improvisation remains in touch with the visible world. It is still possible to discern in the painting the outlines of a sailing boat cleaving the waves and a dog sitting on the shore. One can, however, already sense that freedom of creativity capable of interspersing line and colour, taken in absolute purity, with fragments of reality.

Kandinsky W. Blue Crest. 1917

The literature on Wassily Kandinsky frequently notes the similarities between Blue Crest and the artist’s earlier works, which still retained a large degree of impressions from life. A church with cupolas, houses with pointed rooftops, clouds, rain, a boat with oars and the symbolical representation of a galloping horseman can thus be discerned in the composition of the canvas.

The dynamic development of the main colour motifs and their brightly expressed culmination make Blue Crest one of the artist’s most complex and expressive compositions. The intensive upward climb of the spiral-shaped movement along the diagonal is topped by a blue ridge or crest — the crest of a wave crashing into a bright space permeated with light.