It was the colour that struck me first. Those oranges and reds setting the trees ablaze, laid down in broad strokes against the dense blue of the mountain, with no transition, almost no drawing: Kandinsky does not describe autumn, he renders its intensity. I am especially fond of this period of his work, around 1908, still figurative yet already worked from within by colour. One senses that the landscape is no more than a pretext, that something is about to give way. Before this small cardboard panel, barely 33 centimetres wide, we witness the birth of abstraction almost in real time. And it is a joy.
Look
Drops of turquoise blue fall through the brown foliage, upper right. Look at them: nothing justifies their presence but the pleasure of the eye. Around them, autumn crackles in vertical strokes of ochre, pink, vermilion. A pink sky warms the ridge. The mountain bears down, deep blue, almost cold to the touch. Two tree trunks cut across the scene. A white path winds through, warm as skin.
Understand
The year is 1908. Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter are walking the Bavarian foothills around Murnau. The motif most likely comes from Oberau: the title itself hesitates over the place. The painter works quickly, en plein air, in oil on cardboard, a small format of 32.8 by 44.5 centimetres. The paint stays rich, applied in tight, block-like strokes. Colour abandons its descriptive role: an almond-green meadow, a forest dappled like stained glass. Three years before the founding of the Blue Rider, Expressionism is being tested here, in the exercise itself. And yet Kandinsky signs this study, lower right. A trial piece, then, but claimed as a painting. The contradiction stands unresolved.
Feel
Step closer, in your mind. Feel the resistance of the brushstrokes, their thickness of still-fresh paint. The October air bites; the light warms the ochres. The landscape still exists, but it vibrates differently. Follow the path: it leads nowhere, it sets a rhythm. Your eye walks in its place. Perhaps that is autumn as Kandinsky saw it: a temperature of colours more than a season.
At the Lenbachhaus, the Blue Rider Reimagined
Since 10 March 2026, the Lenbachhaus in Munich has presented “Beyond the World. The Blue Rider”, a new presentation of its Blue Rider collection, on view until September 2027. More than 150 works, including recent acquisitions shown for the first time, ahead of the museum’s centenary. The collection stems from Gabriele Münter’s 1957 donation.
Source: lenbachhaus.de
A Question for You
💭 What if abstraction was born not in 1911, in a theory, but here, in 1908, in a simple plein-air study?
About This Work
- Autumn Study, Probably from Oberau
- Wassily Kandinsky
- 1908
- Oil on cardboard
- 32.8 × 44.5 cm
- Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Gabriele Münter Bequest 1957
- https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/digital/collection-online/detail/herbststudie-vermutlich-aus-oberau-30002999
