Landscape with Two Poplars

Vasily Kandinsky · 1912

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

78.8 × 100.4 cm (31 × 39 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

"Landscape with Two Poplars" captures Kandinsky at a pivotal threshold — the natural world still recognisable, but already dissolving into the rhythmic pulse of colour and form that would define his later abstractions. By 1912, Kandinsky was dismantling the conventions of representational painting from within. The poplars here are less botanical fact than vertical energy — slender, wavering presences set against a landscape charged with expressive colour rather than descriptive accuracy. His brushwork is loose and searching, the palette heightened beyond what the eye sees and tuned instead to what the emotions register. Where a conventional landscape painter records light and atmosphere, Kandinsky uses them as instruments, bending the scene toward something more interior. That same year, he published "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," his landmark treatise arguing that colour and form could carry profound meaning entirely independent of subject matter — a conviction this painting quietly demonstrates before abstraction had fully taken hold. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas using the same medium Kandinsky worked in, preserving the layered texture, tonal warmth, and painterly directness that a print can only approximate. Each piece is painted by hand to order, not mechanically reproduced.