Romantic landscape 1911

Wassily Kandinsky made this Romantic Landscape with oil paint, using loose brushwork and a freewheeling sense of colour. It’s like he’s mapping an inner world, where landscape elements are just excuses for expressive marks. Look at how the paint is laid down – thick in some areas, almost translucent in others. It’s as if he’s not trying to depict a landscape, but rather to capture its essence, its emotional temperature. The bright red sun isn't casting real light, it's more like an idea of light. And those horses, they’re not really horses, they’re just gestures, blurs of motion across the canvas. That big, dark green mass on the right is really interesting. It anchors the composition, but it’s also kind of ambiguous – is it a mountain, a forest, or just a big, blobby shape? It makes me think about some of the early abstract painters like Marsden Hartley, who were also wrestling with how to convey feeling and emotion through abstract forms. For Kandinsky, art wasn’t about representing the world, but about creating a new one.