Murnau With Rainbow

Kandinsky’s Pivotal Landscape: Where Nature Meets Abstraction

In the summer of 1909, Wassily Kandinsky painted Murnau With Rainbow during a transformative stay in the Bavarian village of Murnau. This work captures the moment when his representational landscapes began dissolving into pure chromatic energy—a threshold between the visible world and the abstract compositions that would define his later career. The painting’s vivid palette and fractured forms reflect both the Fauvist influence Kandinsky absorbed in Paris and the emotional intensity of German Expressionism. Here, the rainbow arcs not as a meteorological phenomenon but as a spiritual bridge, linking earth and sky in a composition that pulses with rhythmic tension.

Created the same year Kandinsky co-founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association of Munich), this work embodies the group’s rejection of academic constraints. The village’s white church and rolling hills are rendered in thick, impasto strokes, while the rainbow’s spectral bands vibrate against the deep blues and greens. As the Museum of Modern Art notes, Kandinsky’s Murnau period marked a critical shift toward “the dematerialization of form,” where color and line began to operate independently of their descriptive roles. This print preserves the original’s textural dynamism, from the staccato brushwork of the foreground to the luminous glow of the celestial arc.

Murnau: The Crucible of Kandinsky’s Breakthrough

Between 1908 and 1910, Kandinsky and his companion Gabriele Münter retreated to Murnau am Staffelsee, a village whose vivid colors and rustic architecture became the catalyst for his stylistic evolution. Here, far from Munich’s artistic politics, he abandoned the muted tones of his early Russian works in favor of the bold chromatic contrasts that would define his mature style. Murnau With Rainbow belongs to a series of landscapes where topography serves as a pretext for exploring color’s emotional resonance. The rainbow—a recurring motif in his 1909 output—functions as both a compositional device and a symbol of transcendence, a theme he would later expand in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).

The painting’s division into distinct color zones reflects Kandinsky’s growing interest in theosophy and the synesthetic relationships between hue and sound. As documented by the Tate, his Murnau works often employed “color as the keyboard” of the soul, with each pigment chosen for its vibrational quality rather than its descriptive accuracy. The framed print reveals how Kandinsky’s layered glazes created an inner luminosity—particularly in the rainbow’s violet and orange bands—that defies photographic reproduction.

Unlike his earlier landscapes, where form still anchored meaning, Murnau With Rainbow treats the village as a scaffold for pure visual music. The church steeple’s jagged silhouette doesn’t describe a building; it conducts the viewer’s eye through a symphony of clashing hues.

The Alchemy of Color and Composition

Chromatic Architecture

Kandinsky built Murnau With Rainbow around three primary color masses: the deep ultramarine of the sky, the emerald greens of the hills, and the cadmium reds of the rooftops. These zones are separated by black outlines—a technique borrowed from Bavarian glass painting—that heightens their vibrational contrast. The rainbow’s placement disrupts the horizontal dominance of the landscape, creating a vertical axis that draws the eye upward. His use of complementary colors (red/green, blue/orange) generates optical mixing, making the edges appear to shimmer when viewed at a distance.

Brushwork as Emotional Shorthand

The painting’s surface alternates between thick impasto and thin washes, with the rainbow executed in delicate, almost transparent strokes. This variation in texture mirrors the emotional range Kandinsky sought to evoke: the heavy, sculptural paint of the foreground conveys earthly solidity, while the ethereal rainbow suggests spiritual ascent. Close examination reveals how he scraped and reworked the lower layers, leaving traces of pentimenti that add depth to the printed reproduction.

Displaying Murnau With Rainbow: A Curator’s Approach

This print’s high-contrast palette demands careful placement to avoid visual competition. The 30×40 cm dimensions make it ideal for a study or living room with neutral walls (soft gray, warm white, or pale taupe), where the rainbow’s vibrancy can dominate without clashing. Hang it at eye level in a space with natural light to activate the color interactions Kandinsky intended—the cadmium reds will appear to pulse against cool north-facing light, while the blues deepen in warmer southern exposure. For a contemporary contrast, pair it with minimalist furniture in dark wood or black metal; the painting’s expressive energy will ground the room’s aesthetic. Avoid busy patterns in adjacent textiles, as they may distract from the composition’s rhythmic flow.

More Works by Wassily Kandinsky

Explore Kandinsky’s evolution from figurative landscapes to pure abstraction with these essential works from his German and Bauhaus periods.

Wassily Kandinsky

Red Wall Destiny

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Picture With A White Border

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Wassily Kandinsky

On White Ii

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Wassily Kandinsky

A Floating Figure

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