Improvisation Dreamy by Wassily Kandinsky

Improvisation Dreamy is an Abstract Expressionist painting from 1913 by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian-born modern artist who played a key role in the development of 20th century European art.

Kandinsky is almost within a surrealist world here as he lets his mind wander. Abstract forms appear as he created this latest improvisation, towards the end of his work on this series. We see a whole flurry of activity right across the canvas, all of which is hard to decipher but just clear enough to give us clues. Those knowledgeable around this artist's work will have a better chance of understanding precisely what is going on here. This painting is around 130cm tall and wide in a square aspect, though he would normally choose the landscape dimension instead, as he did re-use objects across multiple compositions.

Whilst this may not have been the artist's most famous painting of all, it is still particularly interesting and also another fine example of the standard approach taken by Kandinsky during this part of his career. For example, the palette features his usual bright tones that contrast so vividly against the black lines that were used to produce form in both of his scenes. In the example of Improvisation Dreamy, though, he reduces his use of black considerably and this forces the different shapes to merge together much more. Perhaps this was an intentional way of creating this idea of a dream-like world, just as we ourselves might imagine it. The remaining contributions to his improvisation series follow a similar pattern, stylistically, but the content is varied considerably.

The painting can be found in the Städtische Galerie, Munich, Germany. Most of his series of improvisations from 1910-1913 can be found here, though some others made their way to the US and UK. The city of Munich itself features a number of different art galleries and museums that beautifully capture the iconic art of this nature that has impacted many different art movements, right from the Northern Renaissance, to the Romanticist era all the way up to creating some of their own within the 19th and 20th century. Whilst Germany contributed so much to modern art, you should also check out the contributions to before that point, including the likes of Durer, Cranach and Friedrich, to just just three. There has also been a number of German artists who have travelled to live in the US and make a name for themselves there, or US artists with genuine roots in this European nation.