Composition VII
A teeming mass of colour, lines and patches without objects. Kandinsky compared painting with music and called his largest works compositions.
Don’t look for a subject – follow how the colours are drawn towards a dark centre on the left.
Wassily Kandinsky painted Composition VII in Munich in 1913. He was born in Moscow but had settled in Germany, where, together with Franz Marc among others, he founded the group Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky called his most elaborately worked pictures compositions, and he made only ten of them in his entire career. Composition VII belongs to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Kandinsky had trained in law and economics and only took up art seriously in his thirties, when he moved to Munich.
The painting is about three metres wide. It is filled with patches of colour, lines, curved forms and small dark areas that cross and overlap. Nothing is clearly depicted. There is nevertheless a centre, a dark oval zone slightly to the left of the middle, where much of the movement seems to gather. The canvas measures about 200 × 300 centimetres and is often regarded as the most complex work Kandinsky painted before the First World War.
The composition has no fixed perspective. The forms seem to swirl around several centres at once, like currents in water. Strong diagonals create movement, while larger, softer areas offer moments of calm. Kandinsky compared the painting to music, in which different voices and themes run simultaneously.
The colours are many and strong: red, yellow, blue, violet and black. Kandinsky had developed a theory of the effects of colour, which he set out in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911. In it he writes about how colours can give rise to emotions and about the relationship between colour and sound. He has often been described as a synaesthete, someone who experienced colours and sounds as linked, but how literally this should be taken is debated.
Kandinsky prepared the painting with a large number of sketches, watercolours and oil studies. He then painted the canvas itself in just a few days. Gabriele Münter, his partner, photographed the painting as he worked on it, and the photographs show how the composition took shape.
Scholars have suggested that the painting contains vestiges of religious motifs, such as the Flood, the Resurrection and the Last Judgement, themes that appear in Kandinsky’s earlier work. These motifs are, however, so dissolved that they cannot be identified with certainty. Kandinsky himself wanted the viewer to experience the picture directly, as one listens to music.
Composition VII is regarded as one of the high points of early abstract art. Kandinsky had to leave Germany when the First World War broke out and returned to Russia. The painting remained in Russia and is now in the Tretyakov Gallery. Kandinsky later taught at the Bauhaus and became one of the most influential theorists of abstract art.