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Lot Essay
Painted in the autumn of 1903, Vasilevskoë-Herbst dates from a particularly important moment in Wassily Kandinsky’s early career, as he began to move beyond naturalistic landscape painting to explore the expressive possibilities of color and an increasingly liberated handling of paint.
Earlier that summer, Kandinsky had spent several months painting en plein air in Kallmünz, Bavaria, with his students from the Phalanx school, including Gabriele Münter, with whom he began a relationship. The small landscapes he produced there became an important testing ground for a freer, more immediate approach to painting directly from nature. Painted shortly after his return to Russia that autumn, Vasilevskoë-Herbst bears witness to this rapidly evolving pictorial language.
Kandinsky had also been deeply affected by the seven paintings by Vincent van Gogh he had seen at the Munich Secession earlier that year. That influence is particularly apparent here in the thick impasto and short, directional strokes through which the landscape is constructed: the foliage dissolves into dabs and slashes of pigment, while the strong diagonal of the road anchors and propels the composition, giving the painting a remarkable sense of movement and depth.
Most striking here is Kandinsky’s increasingly audacious use of color. The golden-yellow road is set against intense greens, while the surrounding landscape breaks into passages of orange, pink and violet, punctuated by touches of blue. These heightened, at times unexpected juxtapositions are no longer purely descriptive: color begins to assume an expressive and structural role of its own, creating rhythm, directing the eye and animating the surface of the composition.
Beyond its importance in Kandinsky’s artistic development, Vasilevskoë-Herbst also has a particularly distinguished provenance. The painting was formerly in the collection of Vladimir Alekseevich Abrikosoff, a prominent Russian collector and member of the council of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Abrikosoff belonged to one of Imperial Russia’s wealthiest merchant families, celebrated for their confectionery empire, and was also Kandinsky’s brother-in-law, having married Maria Shemyakina, the sister of the artist’s first wife, Anna. Kandinsky frequently visited the family’s country estate at Vasilevskoë, outside Moscow, where he painted a number of small landscapes during his visits to Russia. Given these close personal ties, the white, colonnaded house visible in the distance could well be the Abrikosoff family residence.
Earlier that summer, Kandinsky had spent several months painting en plein air in Kallmünz, Bavaria, with his students from the Phalanx school, including Gabriele Münter, with whom he began a relationship. The small landscapes he produced there became an important testing ground for a freer, more immediate approach to painting directly from nature. Painted shortly after his return to Russia that autumn, Vasilevskoë-Herbst bears witness to this rapidly evolving pictorial language.
Kandinsky had also been deeply affected by the seven paintings by Vincent van Gogh he had seen at the Munich Secession earlier that year. That influence is particularly apparent here in the thick impasto and short, directional strokes through which the landscape is constructed: the foliage dissolves into dabs and slashes of pigment, while the strong diagonal of the road anchors and propels the composition, giving the painting a remarkable sense of movement and depth.
Most striking here is Kandinsky’s increasingly audacious use of color. The golden-yellow road is set against intense greens, while the surrounding landscape breaks into passages of orange, pink and violet, punctuated by touches of blue. These heightened, at times unexpected juxtapositions are no longer purely descriptive: color begins to assume an expressive and structural role of its own, creating rhythm, directing the eye and animating the surface of the composition.
Beyond its importance in Kandinsky’s artistic development, Vasilevskoë-Herbst also has a particularly distinguished provenance. The painting was formerly in the collection of Vladimir Alekseevich Abrikosoff, a prominent Russian collector and member of the council of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Abrikosoff belonged to one of Imperial Russia’s wealthiest merchant families, celebrated for their confectionery empire, and was also Kandinsky’s brother-in-law, having married Maria Shemyakina, the sister of the artist’s first wife, Anna. Kandinsky frequently visited the family’s country estate at Vasilevskoë, outside Moscow, where he painted a number of small landscapes during his visits to Russia. Given these close personal ties, the white, colonnaded house visible in the distance could well be the Abrikosoff family residence.