Picture with a black arch 1912

Wassily Kandinsky made this painting, Picture with a Black Arch, in Paris, using oil on canvas. Look at how he’s put it together: those bold, clashing colours, yellows, greens, reds, browns, all held together by a few dark lines. It’s like he’s throwing shapes and colours at us, daring us to make sense of it. Up close, you can see the texture, the way the paint sits on the canvas, thick in some places, thin in others. There’s a real physicality to it, like you could reach out and touch the artist’s hand as he made each mark. See that cluster of lines, near the middle? They seem to both come together and split apart simultaneously, like a crossroads where energy either coalesces or dissipates. Kandinsky was obsessed with the spiritual in art, and in a way, you can see it as a conversation with artists like Hilma af Klint, who was also feeling her way toward abstraction in the early 20th century. It's more a question than an answer.