Munich - English Garden

Munich - English Garden, painted in 1901 and held at the Lenbachhaus, depicts the famous public park in the heart of Munich—one of the largest urban parks in the world and a central social space for the city's residents. The English Garden, with its winding paths, open meadows, beer gardens, and the artificial river channel of the Eisbach, was familiar territory to anyone living in Schwabing, immediately adjacent to the park's northern edge. For Kandinsky, painting in the English Garden was continuous with the Post-Impressionist urban park subjects he had absorbed from French painting.

Park subjects gave Kandinsky the opportunity to combine landscape elements—trees, grass, water—with the social presence of strolling figures. His 1901 handling is open and direct, using varied brushwork to differentiate between organic forms of vegetation and the more geometric paths and clearings of the designed landscape.