Houses at Murnau

Vasily Kandinsky · 1909

Medium

Oil on cardboard

Original size

49 × 64 cm (19 1/4 × 25 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Houses at Murnau pulses with the electric tension of an artist on the verge of reinventing painting entirely — bold, flattened forms and colour pushed far beyond what the eye actually sees. Kandinsky spent several summers in the Bavarian town of Murnau beginning in 1908, working alongside Gabriele Münter, and the landscape there became a crucible for his evolving vision. In this 1909 work on cardboard, the village houses are rendered with almost brutal simplicity — outlines thickened, shadows abandoned, greens and blues chosen for emotional charge rather than accuracy. The result sits somewhere between representational and purely expressive, which is precisely where Kandinsky wanted to be. He was stripping away everything he considered decorative or imitative in Western art to get at what he called the "inner necessity" of a composition. The Murnau period directly preceded his founding of Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc in 1911, widely considered one of the most important moments in early modern art — and works like this one show exactly why that rupture was inevitable. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on the same ground and with the same direct, loaded brushwork Kandinsky used, preserving the raw energy and chromatic intensity that makes this small painting feel far larger than its physical dimensions.