Kochel - Waterfall I

Kochel - Waterfall I, painted in 1900 and held at the Lenbachhaus, is among Kandinsky's earliest surviving landscape studies—a work from the very beginning of his formal painting training in Munich. The Kochel waterfall was a local natural feature that attracted him as an outdoor painting subject, and this earliest version of the motif shows him working with direct observation in the manner he had learned from Ažbé's drawing classes. The 'I' designation suggests a planned series or at least awareness that he would return to this subject.

This early work is likely the most conventionally observational of Kandinsky's Kochel subjects—brushwork and colour choices reflecting plein-air practice before his Post-Impressionist colour theory had fully developed. The waterfall's white rush against darker rock provides the essential tonal contrast around which the composition is organised.