One could say that Kandinsky had acquired a reputation that was more elevated than stable and well-defined. One of the more important events determining Kandinsky’s place in the artistic process of that time was his participation in an exhibition of the Dresden group Die Brücke (the Bridge), the first association of the Expressionists. The paintings and prints of these years are executed in a spirit of unrealized energy. They are capable of delighting, disappointing or exciting curiosity. There is much in them that is attractive, talented and fascinating. But in these works, the real Wassily Kandinsky is absent, or nearly so. Usually the first buds of something new ripen in an artist’s soul long before the new thing becomes historical reality. History tells us, however, of certain moments of culmination, “shining hours,” when searches that have quietly smoldered for years suddenly flare up like comets. The middle of this century’s first decade was saturated with such events: the first exhibit of the Fauves at the 1905 Salon d’Automne; the founding in the summer of that same year of Die Brücke; and finally, the stormy and shocking manifesto not only of Cubism, but of a wholly new vision — Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The work that Kandinsky produced in Murnau at the end of this decade was another such “moment of truth.”
16. Ladies in Crinolines, 1909. Oil on canvas, 96.3 x 128.5 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
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