Holland - Beach chairs

Holland - Beach chairs, painted around 1904 and held at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, documents a journey Kandinsky took to the Netherlands during his formative Munich years. Dutch coastal subjects—beach chairs, shoreline, North Sea light—offered a very different chromatic experience from the Bavarian mountain landscape he painted at Kochel and Murnau. Beach chairs in particular were a modern subject, associated with leisure culture and the democratisation of coastal holiday-making in the late nineteenth century. The Lenbachhaus's comprehensive holding of early Kandinsky situates this Dutch excursion within the broader geographic range of his pre-abstract landscape practice.

The flat Dutch coastal terrain and broad North Sea light gave Kandinsky a horizontal, low-horizon composition quite unlike his Bavarian mountain studies. Beach chairs as colourful objects punctuating the shore provided areas of intense local colour that anticipate his later interest in colour as autonomous compositional element.