Park im Herbst

Kandinsky met Gabriele Münter in 1902 when Münter was a student in his class at the Phalanx art school. In the summer of 1903, Kandinsky took his painting class to the Upper Palatinate of eastern Bavaria, where he painted a number of small landscapes in and around Kallmünz, including the present work, which he gave to Münter. Park im Herbst exemplifies the important relationship between Kandinsky's early work and the Neo-Impressionist work of Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings Kandinsky had greatly admired at the 1903 Munich Secession. Under this influence, Kandinsky's use of the palette knife to apply his paint in thickly worked and textured strokes infuses his paintings with an expressive weight of colour that, in its immediacy and simplicity, seems to be on the point of breaking down his rigorously constructed composition, anticipating the artist's move towards abstraction.

From 1903 and for the next five years Kandinsky and Münter travelled widely throughout Russia, North Africa and Europe. This period heralded a shift in Kandinsky's aesthetic and represents an important period of transition for the artist which culminated in 1908 with his move to Murnau and the creation of his first great breakthrough paintings that marked his emergence as an important figure among the international avant-garde.