Vatican Museums

Sonntag-Altrussisch precedes Kandinsky’s turn to abstraction which occurred around 1910, when he produced his First abstract watercolour. This 1904-1905 woodcut is a little gem in which the artist proposes a subject he also approached during the same years on canvas; in a space that unfolds horizontally, Kandinsky presents a crowd in medieval clothes against the backdrop of a city surrounded by walls. It is a sort of evocation of the old Russia, the world of origins, recreated in an extraordinarily synthetic composition that prefigures the future developments of his formal research. The inspiration for the subject probably comes from a trip to Moscow in 1903, of which he writes to his companion Gabriele Münter, “I have a completely strange feeling here in Moscow. Hundreds of memories, images partly forgotten. … I have not been here for seven years and only now, for the first time, do I unexpectedly have these sentiments”.