Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) (1913): Artwork and History

Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) (1913) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Vasily Kandinsky Born Moscow (formerly Russian Empire, now Russia), 1866; died Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1944.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

In his 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Vasily Kandinsky made an analogy between music and painting as two means of abstraction, a radical mode of artmaking that freed color and line from their traditionally representational functions. Between 1910 and 1914 he produced “improvisations,” works he described as unconscious, spontaneous expressions. Kandinsky commented on Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) in a letter to Arthur Jerome Eddy, a friend and collector from Chicago: “The cannons . . . could probably be explained by the constant war talk going on through the year [but] the true contents are what the spectator experiences while under the effect of the forms and color combinations of the picture.”

Object facts

• Title: Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons)
• Date: 1913
• Artist attribution: Vasily Kandinsky Born Moscow (formerly Russian Empire, now Russia), 1866; died Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1944
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 111 × 111.3 cm (43 11/16 × 43 13/16 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Modern Art
• Reference number: 1931.511

Collection credit

Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.