Composition VII

Buried in the roiling centre of Kandinsky's Composition VII, a small blue boat carries two oars. It is easy to miss. Kandinsky said the painting's starting point was the biblical Deluge. Inside the abstraction he embedded a set of specific glyphs from that story: a boat, a sideways mountain range, a trumpet from the Last Judgment, a small figure in a triangular ark in the upper-left corner. The whole storm on the canvas is Noah's Flood, painted as pure colour instead of narrative. He worked out the composition over months in more than thirty preparatory studies. He painted the final canvas in four days in November 1913. Now at Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow @tretyakov_gallery