Composition VII

A vortex of colour and severed line spirals around a dark central nucleus, apocalyptic and resurrection imagery dissolved almost past recognition into pure pictorial event. Kandinsky made more than thirty preparatory studies and then painted the four-meter canvas in three days in 1913, the culmination of the theory he had set out in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Held by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, it is generally treated as the most ambitious abstract painting of its decade and the point at which European art fully let go of the visible world.