Art Institute of Chicago

Painting with Troika

Vasily Kandinsky

Date

January 18, 1911

Medium

Oil on cardboard; in artist's painted frame

Culture

Germany

Department

Modern Art

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Vasily Kandinsky, along with Franz Marc , Gabriele Münter , and Alexei Jawlensky , was a founding member of Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), a loose alliance of artists based in Munich. Often working in a common palette using expressive brushwork, they shared a belief in the symbolic and spiritual importance of forms and colors, including their effect on emotions and memories. Blaue Reiter also promoted a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting, looking to non-Western, European medieval, and folk art for inspiration. Here the troika, a traditional carriage drawn by three horses, and the hand-painted frame, which Kandinsky made especially for this work, speak to the powerful influence these sources had on the artist.

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