#mountain

The title points at Mount Parnassus, where the Muses were supposed to live, and it's also the name of an old set of music exercises — he played violin seriously, so people reckon both were on his mind. It's said to be one of the biggest canvases he ever did.

It's a print rather than a painting — one of thirty-six goes at the same mountain, run off the blocks in the thousands and sold cheap, more or less a poster. The blue doing all the heavy lifting was a newish imported pigment then, according to Wikipedia, which is part of why it looks the way it does.

Kandinsky is said to be among a small crowd of painters who kept going back to the same Bavarian village around then, daring each other to push the colours further every summer. This is what that dare looked like.

They say he painted this one mountain outside Aix over and over for the last twenty-odd years of his life — the counts people give run past thirty, once you add the watercolours. Nobody commissioned them as far as I can tell. He just kept going back.