Painting with Troika (January 18, 1911): Artwork and History

Painting with Troika (January 18, 1911) 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:

Vasily Kandinsky, along with Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, and Alexei Jawlensky, was a founding member of Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), a loose alliance of artists based in Munich. Often working in a common palette using expressive brushwork, they shared a belief in the symbolic and spiritual importance of forms and colors, including their effect on emotions and memories. Blaue Reiter also promoted a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting, looking to non-Western, European medieval, and folk art for inspiration. Here the troika, a traditional carriage drawn by three horses, and the hand-painted frame, which Kandinsky made especially for this work, speak to the powerful influence these sources had on the artist.

Object facts

• Title: Painting with Troika
• Date: January 18, 1911
• 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 cardboard; in artist's painted frame
• Dimensions: 69.7 × 97.3 cm (27 3/8 × 38 5/16 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Modern Art
• Reference number: 1931.509

Collection credit

Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

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.