About the Work
In the years leading up to World War I, Kandinsky’s compositions became increasingly abstract. Now we frequently encounter isolated, strongly reductive motifs in his works, for example the rowboat, complete with rowers, at the centre. Kandinsky was seemingly free in his combinations of representational fragments such as this one with each other and, sometimes, with completely abstract elements. As vehicles of 'inner sounds', as sensory values, the individual pictorial components were to make spiritual-emotional reality tangible. For Kandinsky, true art lay beyond the visible.
About the Acquisition
The Städel Museum has the photographer, psychotherapist, philanthropist, and long-time Frankfurt resident Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019) to thank for more than ninety works ranging from classical modernism to American pop art. The paintings, drawings, and prints by Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Oskar Schlemmer, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, and others originally belonged to the holdings of her grandfather, the Darmstadt-based industrialist Karl Ströher (1890–1977), who amassed an extensive art collection after World War II.
