Glass Painting with the Sun (Small Pleasures) - Wassily Kandinsky

A 1913 reverse painting on glass by Wassily Kandinsky, featuring expressive forms and symbolic motifs characteristic of his Der Blaue Reiter period.

Wassily Kandinsky produced this work in 1913, a period during which he explored the intersection of folk art traditions and modern abstraction. The technique of reverse painting on glass, or Hinterglasmalerei, was a practice common in Bavarian folk art. Kandinsky, along with other members of the Der Blaue Reiter group, adopted this medium to capture a sense of immediacy and directness in their visual output.

The composition features a series of symbolic forms, including a central hill topped by a structure with towers, a sun, and various figures. The lines are bold and expressive, defining the shapes against a textured, light-toned background. Kandinsky uses colour to separate these elements, employing blues, yellows, and reds to create a sense of movement across the surface. The painting relates to his larger canvas, Small Pleasures, sharing thematic motifs that recur throughout his work from this era.

Unlike his later, more geometric compositions, this piece retains a connection to representational imagery, albeit in a highly stylised form. The figures and architectural elements appear as shorthand symbols rather than literal depictions. This approach allows the viewer to engage with the work through its rhythmic arrangement of shapes and colours. The frame itself is painted, suggesting that the artist viewed the entire object as a unified aesthetic unit. This work provides insight into the transition between his earlier, more figurative paintings and the fully non-objective art he would develop in subsequent decades.