Das bunte Leben (1907): a monumental turning point on Kandinsky’s road to abstraction

In May 1906, the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter arrived in Paris. The pair, who were also lovers, had spent much of the previous three years travelling together through Europe and North Africa. Now they settled into a property on the Rue des Ursulines, in the 5th arrondissement.

Their aim was to immerse themselves in the fervent Parisian art scene, where avant-garde painters — from the Post-Impressionists to the Fauves — were at work. The impact on Kandinsky was marked, and it was in such a context that he produced the monumental painting Das bunte Leben, in 1907.

Within a few years, he would establish himself as one of the pioneers of Western abstraction, and this picture marks a major turning point in his oeuvre. On 14 October 2026, the work will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s in London.

Of the works made around the time of Das bunte Leben, Kandinsky said that he wanted to ‘let the viewer take a stroll within the picture’ and ‘become absorbed’ in it. In this particular case, one strolls into a mysterious panoramic landscape teeming with life.

People of various ages and backgrounds gather together in a semi-rural setting: from pilgrims and peasants, beggars and monks, to a mother cradling her young child, each of them dressed in vividly patterned clothing. No clear narrative thread unites them. However, activity abounds, in a set of intriguing vignettes.

Kandinsky painted the scene in distinct compositional bands, leading our eye from figures in the foreground to a walled town crowning a hill in the distance. The figures include an aged traveller with a walking stick, and a pipe-player (on the right) who creates a festive atmosphere, while those around her eat, revel and chat.

That atmosphere doesn’t extend to the area directly behind them, though, where a handful of men are engaged in heated argument. Behind those men, in turn, is the more startling sight of a battle between a crowd of figures with spears.

Newly settled in Paris, Kandinsky and Münter attended numerous art exhibitions and got to know dealers, gallerists and collectors aplenty. The collectors included the expatriate American siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein, who acquired Henri Matisse’s picture Le Bonheur de vivre after its successful showing at the Salon des Indépendants early in 1906. Leo went so far as to describe it as ‘the most important painting of our age’. This joyful scene depicts a set of nude figures reclining and frolicking together in an Arcadian landscape.

It’s possible that Kandinsky saw the painting on a visit to the Steins’ apartment. In any case, he would have been aware of a trend in contemporary Paris for art exploring the richness of human life through scenes set in utopias. Other examples include Paul Signac’s Au temps d’Harmonie and André Derain’s La Danse.

Kandinsky challenged himself to emulate his peers with a take on a similar theme. Set on a grand scale, measuring 130.5 x 162.6 cm, Das bunte Leben was his largest painting to date.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He trained as a lawyer and, before deciding upon a life in art, served as associate professor of law at Moscow University. His initial career saw him travel through the Russian province of Vologda, hundreds of miles north of his home town, to study the local legal system.

He found the area untouched by Western influence. It was like ‘journeying to another planet’, Kandinsky said, emerging from his trip in 1889 with a lifelong appreciation of the wealth of traditional art, culture and storytelling that persisted there.

By the time of his move to Paris, that appreciation was twinned with a wider one of Russian folklore as a whole, notably the epic songs known as byliny, which told of heroic and magical characters. Now this was to manifest itself in his art.

Kandinsky produced a number of pictures, such as Das bunte Leben and Lied (Chanson) — today part of the Pompidou Centre’s collection — which drew heavily on elements from different tales. With these works, Kandinsky said he wished to ‘express the musical spirit of Russia’.

The shift may have been inspired, at least in part, by the popularity of the Exposition de l’art Russe, a vast exhibition of old and new Russian art organised as part of the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1906 by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Though none of the 700-plus works in Diaghilev’s showcase was by Kandinsky, the artist visited multiple times.

These experiences, combined with his memories of traditional legends and stories, found bold expression in Das bunte Leben. Certain details and motifs may be tied to specific tales, such as the house of a legendary witch called Baba Yaga, seen in a tree canopy towards the composition’s top right; and the figures of Boris and Gleb in the central foreground, two royal princes who, after their martyrdom in 1015, were declared saints.

There is also an armoured knight on horseback, raising his sword in the air. Knights were recurring characters in byliny, and the example here seems to be readying his steed for a mission outside of the picture, to the right. The character of the horse and rider would later become the iconic emblem of the Blaue Reiter group Kandinsky founded in Munich alongside Franz Marc.

Das bunte Leben translates as ‘The Colourful Life’, and the painting’s colour — at once expressive and intense — is among its most striking features. Against a black ground, numerous bright touches of pigment stand out, accentuating the slight sense of otherworldliness.

Kandinsky’s influence here may have been the clothing and furniture he saw in Vologda — their ornamentation so brightly coloured, he said he would never forget it.

Another influence was surely the Fauves, who had burst onto the art scene in 1905, liberating colour from its ages-old descriptive function. They heightened the vibrancy of their pigments and treated colour as an autonomous force capable of conveying emotion and spirit, or simply serving as decoration.

Such freedom of colour is in evidence throughout Das bunte Leben, perhaps most notably in the rendering of the traveller’s beard in luminous mint-green. It marked a crucial stepping stone on Kandinsky’s career path towards complete abstraction (a destination he reached in the run-up to the First World War, with works such as Composition VII).

Kandinsky had strong ambitions for Das bunte Leben. He showed it at the Salon d’Automne in October 1907. It was subsequently acquired by the progressive German gallerist Herwarth Walden, who included it in an exhibition of the artist’s work at his Berlin headquarters, Galerie Der Sturm, in 1912.

Emanuel Albert Lewenstein and Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann, a Dutch husband and wife, purchased the painting the following decade. The former ran a successful business manufacturing and selling sewing machines, and the couple were keen collectors of modern art. They also owned works by the likes of Jean Metzinger and Oskar Kokoschka.

Lewenstein died in 1930, and his wife in 1937, after which, according to the terms set out in her will, the couple’s art collection was to be divided between their two children, Robert and Wilhelmine Lewenstein.

There is no indication that such a division ever took place, however. When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands shortly after the start of the Second World War, both Robert and Wilhelmine were living abroad.

Because they were Jewish, the siblings’ assets — including their shares in the family business — were confiscated. The art collection was lost to them, too, being offered for sale at the Amsterdam auction house Frederik Muller & Cie in October 1940. (It remains unclear under whose direction the works came to market, or who benefited from the proceeds.)

Das bunte Leben was bought by the Dutch collector Salomon B. Slijper, after whose death in 1971 it entered the collection of Bayerische Landesbank in Germany. The bank placed the painting on long-term loan at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, in Munich, where it hung for almost five decades.

In 2023, Das bunte Leben was restituted to the Lewensteins’ heirs following decades of diligent research and legal action on the family’s part — Robert and Wilhelmine having begun a quest at the end of the war to recover their parents’ art collection.

The German art historian and Kandinsky expert Hans K. Roethel described Das bunte Leben as ‘one of Kandinsky’s most important paintings’. It is a timeless scene, meditating on the complexity of human existence. Peace is juxtaposed with strife, old with young, rich with poor, and (in the case of the two lovers on the right, unaware of a funeral procession going on behind them) love with death.

Such dichotomies and symbolic allusions are found across the picture — Kandinsky marrying the cultural traditions of his native Russia with the cutting-edge artistic developments he was absorbing apace in Paris.

Das bunte Leben will tour to Christie’s in Hong Kong until 29 September 2026

Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art London auctions, 14-21 October