Kochel, Mountain Meadow

Wassily Kandinsky's 'Kochel, Mountain Meadow' (1902) depicts the Alpine meadow landscape near the Bavarian lake town — the high mountain meadow with its specific vegetation, its Alpine light quality, and its dramatic mountain backdrop was one of the most distinctive of Central European landscape subjects. His Kochel mountain meadow subjects showed his sustained engagement with this specific Bavarian landscape that he regularly visited from Munich.

Kandinsky renders the mountain meadow with his characteristic decorative simplification — the Alpine meadow's specific character (the summer flowers, the grass, the quality of the mountain light, the surrounding peaks) depicted through his bold color and form organization. His handling of the mountain meadow's horizontal expanse within the vertical Alpine context creates the compositional structure of this high-altitude landscape.