Nymphenburg

Nymphenburg, painted in 1904 and held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, depicts the famous Baroque palace and gardens on the outskirts of Munich—a subject that would have attracted Kandinsky both as a spectacular architectural ensemble and as a setting for the kind of costumed historical imagery he was exploring at the time. Nymphenburg's gardens, with their formal canals and Baroque pavilions, offered a visually rich setting that Kandinsky could approach either as landscape or as symbolic stage. The Minneapolis Institute of Art's Kandinsky holdings provide important representation of this early figurative period.

The formal garden setting gives the composition architectural geometry—the axial layout of Baroque gardens—against which Kandinsky places organic forms of vegetation and, presumably, figures. His handling at this date is still observationally based, translating the visual qualities of the Nymphenburg setting into Post-Impressionist colour patches.