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Lot Essay
'On 17 May 1903 Kandinsky wrote to Mnter about the summer trip planned by the students of his painting class at the 'Phalanx' school: "After searching for a long time and many endless discussions, we decided to go to Kallmnz". The village with hilltop medieval castle and old houses is situated north of Regensburg at the convergence of the Vils and Naab rivers in eastern Bavaria. From 5 June until 12 August Kandinsky spent most of his time with six students painting in Kallmnz and the surrounding countryside of the Oberpfalz. He continued to work from nature: several pencil drawings in sketchbooks were developed into small oil studies of landscapes... Sketches of the yellow mail coach in Kallmnz and Nabburg reappear the following year in a large canvas titled Stormy Weather (Gewitterstimmung. Other views of Kallmnz are depicted in the work of both Kandinsky and Mnter' (V. Endicott Barnett, op. cit., Munich, 1995, p. 95).
At his arrival in Kallmnz in the early summer of 1903, Kandinsky moved in with his students at the Wirtshaus 'Zur roten Amsel', near the Vils bridge and the mill (fig. 1). Later in June, Mnter joined Kandinsky, despite the fears that the students would notice their love affair, and Kallmnz became the cradle of the two artists' romance. Kandinsky's and Mnter's relationship became more serious during the summer, and at the end of August Kandinsky offered her an engagement ring, along with the large gouache Die Nacht (Spazierende Dame), now housed in the Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Fired by the chromatic richness of the Bavarian summer, Kandinsky returned to the village in the summer of 1904. His second stay was a sort of 'artistic pilgrimage' to the spots he had immortalised in 1903: among these was the countryroad in the outskirts of the village, which featured prominently in two of the artist's most impressive early oils. The striking plasticity of the S-shaped bend of this country road outside Kallmnz, painted with a thick, heavy brushstroke, is also captured in Kallmnz, 1903 (Städtische Galerie, Munich, fig.3), which must have been one of Kandinsky's earliest gifts to Mnter, since it appears in an old photograph taken in her apartment at No. 44, Schachstrasse, Munich, where she lived from November 1903 until April 1904. Kallmnz-Gewitterstimmung is the 1904 'revisitation' of the artist's favourite corner: with a more mature, lucid eye, Kandinsky once again focuses on the massive expanse of the wheat fields, lit by a dramatic, Van Goghesque sky. When considering the strictly planar base on which Kandinsky's composition is organised, one must refer to Van Gogh's extraordinarily avant-garde compositions, which were so pivotal to the German avant-garde of the early Twentieth Century. In the present oil, as in Van Gogh's Provençal landscapes (see fig. 2), 'Horizontal bands lead the eye from stubble to uncut wheat, to more sheaves of wheat and stubble, and finally to horizon and sky. The self-containment of each band is broken only by the sheaves in the foreground and the two horizon-line trees' (R. Pickvance, Van Gogh in Arles, Exh. Cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Oct.-Dec. 1984, p. 99). Kandinsky had admired the works of the Neo-Impressionist master at the 1903 Munich Secession, where seven of Van Gogh's paintings were exhibited, and in 1904 he had included works by Van Gogh and the Neo-Impressionists in the tenth exhibition of the Phalanx. Whilst adopting Van Gogh's impasto and stylistic cyphers, in the early years of the century Kandinsky was developing an approach to art radically opposed to that of the Neo-Impressionists: '[Kandinsky], certes, recourt à la technique divisionniste mais d'une toute autre manière. Il ne cherche pas à parvenir à la sérenité, à obtenir cette parfaite uniformité de texture dans toutes les zones du tableau, qui caractérise les oeuvres de Signac, Cross ou Luce... Parfois, à la limite du "chromo", les petites esquisses à l'huile [de Kandinsky] sont le plus souvent des tentatives avortées de fixer moins le paysage que l'humeur du peintre face à telle ou telle beauté naturelle. Elles sont tributaires de l'instant...' (C. Derouet, Oeuvres de Vassily Kandinsky. Les Collections du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1984, p. 22).
Despite the fact that this painting was known from an old photograph
(Fonds Kandinsky) on which the artist wrote "Die Postkutsche gemalt in Kallmnz", this large canvas has only recently been located, having been with the descendants of the celebrated Rothemund family from Dresden.
The Rothermundt collection contained amongst others important works by Liebermann, van Gogh, Corot, Cézanne and Degas, and a great deal of it was sold on behalf of the family by Paul Cassirer in Berlin in the 1930s.
At his arrival in Kallmnz in the early summer of 1903, Kandinsky moved in with his students at the Wirtshaus 'Zur roten Amsel', near the Vils bridge and the mill (fig. 1). Later in June, Mnter joined Kandinsky, despite the fears that the students would notice their love affair, and Kallmnz became the cradle of the two artists' romance. Kandinsky's and Mnter's relationship became more serious during the summer, and at the end of August Kandinsky offered her an engagement ring, along with the large gouache Die Nacht (Spazierende Dame), now housed in the Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Fired by the chromatic richness of the Bavarian summer, Kandinsky returned to the village in the summer of 1904. His second stay was a sort of 'artistic pilgrimage' to the spots he had immortalised in 1903: among these was the countryroad in the outskirts of the village, which featured prominently in two of the artist's most impressive early oils. The striking plasticity of the S-shaped bend of this country road outside Kallmnz, painted with a thick, heavy brushstroke, is also captured in Kallmnz, 1903 (Städtische Galerie, Munich, fig.3), which must have been one of Kandinsky's earliest gifts to Mnter, since it appears in an old photograph taken in her apartment at No. 44, Schachstrasse, Munich, where she lived from November 1903 until April 1904. Kallmnz-Gewitterstimmung is the 1904 'revisitation' of the artist's favourite corner: with a more mature, lucid eye, Kandinsky once again focuses on the massive expanse of the wheat fields, lit by a dramatic, Van Goghesque sky. When considering the strictly planar base on which Kandinsky's composition is organised, one must refer to Van Gogh's extraordinarily avant-garde compositions, which were so pivotal to the German avant-garde of the early Twentieth Century. In the present oil, as in Van Gogh's Provençal landscapes (see fig. 2), 'Horizontal bands lead the eye from stubble to uncut wheat, to more sheaves of wheat and stubble, and finally to horizon and sky. The self-containment of each band is broken only by the sheaves in the foreground and the two horizon-line trees' (R. Pickvance, Van Gogh in Arles, Exh. Cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Oct.-Dec. 1984, p. 99). Kandinsky had admired the works of the Neo-Impressionist master at the 1903 Munich Secession, where seven of Van Gogh's paintings were exhibited, and in 1904 he had included works by Van Gogh and the Neo-Impressionists in the tenth exhibition of the Phalanx. Whilst adopting Van Gogh's impasto and stylistic cyphers, in the early years of the century Kandinsky was developing an approach to art radically opposed to that of the Neo-Impressionists: '[Kandinsky], certes, recourt à la technique divisionniste mais d'une toute autre manière. Il ne cherche pas à parvenir à la sérenité, à obtenir cette parfaite uniformité de texture dans toutes les zones du tableau, qui caractérise les oeuvres de Signac, Cross ou Luce... Parfois, à la limite du "chromo", les petites esquisses à l'huile [de Kandinsky] sont le plus souvent des tentatives avortées de fixer moins le paysage que l'humeur du peintre face à telle ou telle beauté naturelle. Elles sont tributaires de l'instant...' (C. Derouet, Oeuvres de Vassily Kandinsky. Les Collections du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1984, p. 22).
Despite the fact that this painting was known from an old photograph
(Fonds Kandinsky) on which the artist wrote "Die Postkutsche gemalt in Kallmnz", this large canvas has only recently been located, having been with the descendants of the celebrated Rothemund family from Dresden.
The Rothermundt collection contained amongst others important works by Liebermann, van Gogh, Corot, Cézanne and Degas, and a great deal of it was sold on behalf of the family by Paul Cassirer in Berlin in the 1930s.