
Composition VII
Kandinsky made more than thirty studies for this and then painted the four-meter canvas in three days, apocalypse dissolved past recognition.

Kandinsky made more than thirty studies for this and then painted the four-meter canvas in three days, apocalypse dissolved past recognition.

Black skeins and floating patches of color with nothing recognizable in it at all. Kandinsky thought painting could work on you like music.

A curve of the guitar, some stenciled letters, and otherwise a lattice of brown and grey. Braque and Picasso developed this together, canvas by canvas.

A train crosses the sky upside down, a man drifts past on a parachute, and the cat on the sill has a human face.

Sleeping women tangled into a whirlpool of pattern and flowers, one of them at the center just about to wake up.

The deer have almost dissolved into the crystalline planes of the wood, which is exactly what Marc was after.

Foxes curled together and assembled out of shards of grey, blue and rust. Marc was killed at Verdun three years after painting it.

Beckmann painted the disaster a year after it happened, borrowing Géricault's raft, and it now reads as a rehearsal for the war.