.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Kochel—Dorfkirche is an early work by Kandinsky which epitomizes his innovations in the Neo-Impressionist style and anticipates his exploration with luminous color as a future member of Der Blaue Reiter. The artist had joined the Munich Academy in 1900 to take classes taught by Franz von Stuck. He soon, however, left his academic studies to become a founding member of the Phalanx group in Schwabing at the end of May 1901. Phalanx operated as both a school and a gallery aiming to move away from the traditional conservatism of the academy by teaching and exhibiting a more avant-garde approach to art. Kandinsky became president of the society later that year and planned most of the exhibitions, including one of the first shows of Claude Monet's work in Munich.
In these years, Kandinsky produced a small number of oil paintings depicting Munich and its environs. In the summer of 1902 he took his class of students from the Phalanx school to the village of Kochel, around seventy kilometers from Munich. There he was particularly inspired by the dramatic terrain and found the setting particularly conducive to creative development. Working primarily in oil and in small format en plein air, Kandinsky sought to capture the atmosphere and ambience of the surrounding landscape. The paintings he created there show the artist in early maturity. Heavily influenced by the Neo-Impressionist techniques with which he had been experimenting, the thick impasto of his paintings from this period had grown so intense that they become almost over-laden with color. These plein-air studies, executed with paint taken directly from the tube, show the growing influence of Monet's sense of light and Signac's stylistic technique on the artist. In the present work, his use of the palette knife to apply the paint in thickly worked and textured strokes infuses it with an expressive weight of color 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. As Vivian Endicott-Barnett notes: “The colors are clearer and the paint handling more assured in the studies painted in Kochel in the summer of 1902 than in earlier works” (Vassily Kandinsky, A Colorful Life, New York, 1996, p. 47).
The summer of 1902 at Kochel was also a personally significant one for the artist, as it was during these months that his relationship developed with one of his students, Gabriele Münter, the first owner of the present work and a fellow artist who would become his companion between 1903 and 1916.
In these years, Kandinsky produced a small number of oil paintings depicting Munich and its environs. In the summer of 1902 he took his class of students from the Phalanx school to the village of Kochel, around seventy kilometers from Munich. There he was particularly inspired by the dramatic terrain and found the setting particularly conducive to creative development. Working primarily in oil and in small format en plein air, Kandinsky sought to capture the atmosphere and ambience of the surrounding landscape. The paintings he created there show the artist in early maturity. Heavily influenced by the Neo-Impressionist techniques with which he had been experimenting, the thick impasto of his paintings from this period had grown so intense that they become almost over-laden with color. These plein-air studies, executed with paint taken directly from the tube, show the growing influence of Monet's sense of light and Signac's stylistic technique on the artist. In the present work, his use of the palette knife to apply the paint in thickly worked and textured strokes infuses it with an expressive weight of color 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. As Vivian Endicott-Barnett notes: “The colors are clearer and the paint handling more assured in the studies painted in Kochel in the summer of 1902 than in earlier works” (Vassily Kandinsky, A Colorful Life, New York, 1996, p. 47).
The summer of 1902 at Kochel was also a personally significant one for the artist, as it was during these months that his relationship developed with one of his students, Gabriele Münter, the first owner of the present work and a fellow artist who would become his companion between 1903 and 1916.