  About the Artwork
  
  
  Wassily Kandinsky made this painting in preparation for a larger and more abstract work entitled Painting with White Form. Nonrepresentational shapes, colors, and lines dominate, although there are vestiges of the tangible world. In the upper right, outlines of golden domed buildings on a steep hillside recall landscapes in the Bavarian countryside where Kandinsky was living and the architecture in his native Russia. The arrangement of horizontal and vertical lines in the lower right evokes a recurring motif in Kandinsky’s works: the rider on the horseback who leaps toward blue and white forms, symbolizing the spiritual. The artist rejected rationalism and materialism as symptoms of the decline and alienation of modernity; instead, he searched for the revelation of inner aspects of the world through form and color.
  
  
  Title
  Study for Painting with White Form
  
  
  Artwork Date
  1913
  
  Artist
  Wassily Kandinsky
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1866-1944
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  Russian
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 39 1/4 × 34 3/4 inches (99.7 × 88.3 cm)
  Framed: 41 11/16 × 36 15/16 × 2 1/8 inches (105.9 × 93.8 × 5.4 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  European Modern Art to 1970
  
  
  Credit
  Gift of Mrs. Ferdinand Moeller
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  57.234
  
  
  Copyright
  © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
