Painting with Troika

Vasily Kandinsky · January 18, 1911

Medium

Oil on cardboard; in artist's painted frame

Original size

69.7 × 97.3 cm (27 3/8 × 38 5/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Painted in the same extraordinary year that Kandinsky published *Concerning the Spiritual in Art* and co-founded Der Blaue Reiter, *Painting with Troika* sits right at the hinge of one of art history's most consequential transformations. Kandinsky had been dismantling representational painting for years, letting colour and form carry emotional weight independent of subject matter. Here the troika — a three-horse Russian sled, a motif rooted deep in his childhood memories of Moscow — flickers at the edge of legibility, the horses and riders dissolving into loose, energetic strokes of cobalt, ochre, and crimson. The composition vibrates rather than depicts, already halfway to the pure abstraction he would achieve within months. What makes this piece especially rare is the artist's own hand-painted frame, which he designed as a continuous extension of the work itself — a deliberate act that dissolves the boundary between painting and object, image and environment. The work has been held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it is regarded as a key document of Kandinsky's pivotal early period. A hand-painted oil reproduction on the same scale honours the physicality of the original — the textured brushwork, the layered tones, the sense that colour here is not decoration but feeling made visible.