In the forest

In the forest, painted in 1904 and held at the Lenbachhaus, depicts the interior experience of the Bavarian forest—a subject that later German Expressionist painters would invest with symbolic and psychological significance. Kandinsky's forest paintings from this period are more straightforwardly observational than his symbolic historical subjects, though his approach to colour and form was already beginning to move toward expressive rather than purely descriptive purposes. The forest offered enclosed, dappled light very different from the open alpine landscapes he also painted.

Forest interiors give Kandinsky a vertical compositional structure dominated by tree trunks and the filtering of light through canopy. His handling is more gestural and less precisely descriptive than in his open landscape studies, with the enclosed space allowing a greater density of painterly incident.