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by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2023
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) by Wassily Kandinsky: Introduction
A large blue form crosses the middle of Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons). Around it, red, yellow, green and black marks seem to push in different directions. Near the lower right, dark wheels and slanting barrels give the eye something recognisable: cannons. Wassily Kandinsky painted the work in 1913, a year before the First World War began. Its military details are real, but its subject cannot be reduced to a picture of that later conflict. Kandinsky told the Chicago collector Arthur Jerome Eddy that the cannons may have reflected the war talk he had heard, while the painting's main content lay in the effect of its colour and form on a viewer. The tension between those two ways of seeing is central to the work. [1]; [2].
Watch: Wassily Kandinsky
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Curator Megan Fontanella introduces Kandinsky and the Guggenheim collection.
Watch on YouTubeAt a Glance
- Artist:Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944).
- Title:Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), also documented with the German word Kanonen.
- Date:1913.
- Medium and size:oil on canvas, 111 × 111.3 cm.
- Collection:Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection, accession 1931.511.
- Related study:Design for Improvisation 30 (Cannons), January 1913, Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Where this work sits in Kandinsky’s career
The Blue Rider
1903Composition VII
1913Composition VIII
1923Several Circles
1926Sky Blue
1940Contents
- The first encounter: colour before cannons
- Kandinsky's account of the blue centre and heavy corners
- What does “improvisation” mean here?
- The war picture painted before the war
- A painting seen in London and Chicago
- The study and the finished canvas
- Placing it among Kandinsky's 1913 works
- What the early disagreement teaches us
- Looking again
- Frequently asked questions
- References
The first encounter: colour before cannons
The picture's title encourages us to find the artillery, yet most of the surface does not behave like a conventional battle scene. A wide blue shape holds the centre, edged by pale pink and white passages. A darker, jagged shape sits beneath it. Above, bands of red and yellow sweep over dark green; to the left, a paler cloud-like area cuts into the coloured field. No single horizon line settles these forms into a landscape. We feel a whole surface under pressure before we work out which marks might stand for objects.
The painting is almost square. That shape matters because the movement does not simply unfold from left to right. Curves travel across the centre, long dark strokes descend, and forms seem to enter or exit at several edges. The eye can follow one path, then find that another line crosses it. Kandinsky made a visual field that asks to be explored repeatedly rather than read as one event with an obvious beginning and end.
The cannons appear low on the right. Wheels and angled dark lines are visible amid warm orange, white and brown strokes. Their forms are compressed, and the blue masses that might suggest smoke are much larger and stranger than a literal puff from a barrel. On another look, the Art Institute points to leaning buildings and figures in a crowd elsewhere in the image. These traces are easier to perceive once someone names them, but they never settle the whole painting into an orderly town or battlefield. [1].
Arthur Jerome Eddy, an early owner and an unusually involved witness, wrote that people handling the painting called it a war picture. He described two cannons in the lower right, apparent blue discharges and other possible signs of violence, including a leaning tower. His account is valuable because it records how quickly viewers could build a narrative from a few legible details. It is also an interpretation by a particular collector in 1914, not a neutral inventory of everything Kandinsky intended. [2].
Eddy understood the danger of looking only for war. He printed Kandinsky's response at length. The artist did not deny that cannons are visible. He distinguished them from the painting's deeper purpose, which he located in how the arrangement of colour and shape affects a spectator. If we erase the cannons, we miss an important part of the picture. If we make them the only subject, we miss the relations that occupy almost all of the canvas. The painting keeps those possibilities in view at once. [7].
Kandinsky's account of the blue centre and heavy corners
Kandinsky's own explanation is unusually precise about structure. In the letter reproduced by Eddy, he describes a loose cross-like arrangement. A large, irregular blue area forms one centre a little below the middle; a grey, ragged area beneath it forms another. The corners feel denser and weightier than these centres, with differences of line, outline and colour among them. The result is an image that loosens toward the centre while drawing weight toward its edges. This is Kandinsky's analysis of his own painting, not a mathematical grid that must be imposed on every inch of the canvas. [7].
His description changes the way the blue can be seen. It is not merely smoke or an object. The broad form acts as a structural centre, holding several streams of line and colour in relation. Kandinsky even thought its blue worked against the aggressive impression made by the artillery. A colour can therefore alter the effect of a recognisable form without making that form disappear. This is a more specific claim than saying, in general, that Kandinsky associated blue with calm: here he discussed blue in this painting and in relation to its cannons. [7].
At the edges, the heavier passages prevent the centre from dissolving into a void. Dark strokes and bright masses cluster around the margins. The corners do not match one another, but each adds pressure to the whole. Kandinsky remembered urging himself to make them heavy as he worked. That recollection suggests a painter responding to what the picture needed while painting it, even if he later described its overall arrangement in analytical terms. Spontaneity and judgement were both part of the process he reported. [7].
The letter was published in English by Eddy in 1914. We do not need to assume its printed wording is an untouched German original. Its value lies in the detailed account of this particular canvas, reproduced by a collector who knew the painting, and in the way its structural observations can be tested against the visible image. The blue centre, lower grey mass and unequal corners are there to examine. A reader can agree or disagree with the effect Kandinsky thought they produced.
What does “improvisation” mean here?
Kandinsky used “Impression,” “Improvisation” and “Composition” as titles or working categories during these years. In his theoretical writing, an improvisation was associated with a more inward and less consciously planned origin than a composition. That distinction can be helpful, but it should not be hardened into a rule that every mark was accidental. Improvisation No. 30 shows how a work could arise from an urgent impulse and still be shaped through decisions about its balance, edges and colour. Kandinsky's account to Eddy describes both a forceful inner need and a careful sense of visual weight. [7]; [6].
The word “improvisation” also evokes music, an analogy Kandinsky explored in writing and practice. Music can organise a listener's experience without copying a visible object. Kandinsky was interested in a comparable possibility for painting: line, colour and rhythm might make an experience that cannot be fully paraphrased as a scene. The Art Institute places this work within his effort to move beyond imitation of the physical world. That context explains why the cannons present an interesting problem rather than a contradiction to hide. The real forms remain, while the painting asks them to participate in a larger arrangement. [1].
Calling it an improvisation should not prevent us from asking how it was prepared. A separate January 1913 study survives at Lenbachhaus. It uses several materials on paper and has an almost square format, 53 × 52.5 cm. Its existence alone shows that the finished Chicago oil did not appear without any preceding material exploration. Comparing the two can help trace which large relations mattered to Kandinsky, but the study is not a reduced photograph of the final canvas. Different media allow different kinds of edge, transparency and revision. [3].
The Lenbachhaus catalogue supplies a further physical connection. Kandinsky marked the study at lower left, and its reverse carries an inscription identifying Improvisation 30 and the year 1913. Gabriele Münter added her own notation. Those inscriptions make the study's relation to the finished painting more secure than a resemblance noticed by a later viewer alone. They also show why the works should be catalogued separately: one is a marked sheet of mixed media at Munich, the other a much larger oil at Chicago. [3].
The war picture painted before the war
The painting was made in 1913 and shown in London that July. The First World War began the following year. A caption calling Improvisation No. 30 a response to the war's outbreak reverses this chronology. War could nevertheless be discussed and imagined before 1914. In the letter printed by Eddy, Kandinsky proposed that persistent war talk during the year might explain why cannons found their way into the image. He was careful about the limits of that explanation: he did not say that he had set out to illustrate a battle. [1]; [7].
The distinction is more than a correction of a date. A direct war painting would ask us to identify an event, participants and consequences. Here no particular army, location or named conflict is documented in the museum or contemporary account. The cannon shapes can suggest fear or disturbance, but the viewer is not given enough to build a reliable historical scene. Eddy's first viewers supplied a war story because they recognised artillery and smoke. Kandinsky asked them to attend to how the whole image was built, including forms that did not behave as weapons or buildings.
That does not make the picture politically empty. It tells us what the evidence supports. The appearance of cannons in a 1913 abstract painting and Kandinsky's own reference to war talk show that contemporary anxieties could enter his work. His insistence that the painting was not intended as a representation of war shows something else: he thought an abstract work could be affected by the world without becoming an illustration of it. The two observations coexist. [7].
The visible traces of people and buildings strengthen that complexity. They offer points of contact with the familiar world while the broad blue centre, broken contours and conflicting directions frustrate a single narrative. On a first look, a cannon may make the canvas seem aggressive. On another, its relative size and location become clear: the artillery occupies one region in a field much larger than itself. Seeing the cannon is a beginning to the analysis, not its end. [1].
A painting seen in London and Chicago
The Art Institute's exhibition history places the work at the London Salon of the Allied Artists' Association in the Royal Albert Hall in July 1913, catalogue number 286. Eddy's book, published the next year, likewise names it among three Kandinsky canvases shown there: a landscape with two poplars and Improvisations 29 and 30. That pairing exposed viewers to both an identifiable landscape and images whose forms resisted ordinary description. The London showing is evidence that Improvisation No. 30 entered public discussion soon after it was made, before it became a fixture of museum history. [1]; [2].
Eddy was a Chicago lawyer, collector and advocate of modern art. His 1914 book gives the work a prominent place and reproduces Kandinsky's explanation. He recorded that some people saw only disorder at first, while others began to notice relations of colour and form after sustained looking. The account is not an impartial survey of all audiences. Eddy argued for modern painting and wanted readers to give unfamiliar work time. Still, it is a rare near-contemporary record of how this painting was discussed and defended. [2]; [2].
The ownership history has a small but meaningful wrinkle. The museum's archived essay says Eddy bought the painting in 1913. Its current database gives a more cautious provenance: he probably purchased it from Kandinsky and held it by 1920. The database records its descent to Eddy's wife and son, who gave it to the Art Institute in 1931. Rather than claim a purchase day that the records do not securely establish, the solid sequence is enough: early ownership by Eddy, presentation in his book, family succession and the museum gift. [1]; [1].
In the Art Institute, the canvas became part of the Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection. The institution's record documents later exhibitions in Chicago and beyond, including the Museum of Modern Art's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition of 1936 and the National Gallery of Art's 1981 show devoted to Kandinsky's improvisations. These entries show how the painting's public meaning kept changing: it was first a striking and difficult new work, then an example in histories of abstract art, and later a subject for closer study of the improvisation series. That is an inference from its exhibition trail, not evidence that every viewer responded in the same way. [1].
The study and the finished canvas
The preparatory sheet at Lenbachhaus invites a closer look at Kandinsky's choices. The museum dates it to January 1913, giving a firmer point in the painting's development than the finished oil's year alone. It is about half the width and height of the Chicago canvas and combines gouache, watercolour, ink and chalk on coarse light-brown paper. Its surface and scale would have let Kandinsky work with different speeds and textures before the translation into oil. [3]; [1].
“Preparatory” does not mean that the oil was merely enlarged from a complete plan. A painting over a metre square asks its colours and lines to hold together over a much broader field. An arrangement that works on a fifty-centimetre sheet can change when brush marks are made with oil on canvas. The study is therefore most useful as evidence that Kandinsky investigated the picture's relationships, not as proof that every final decision was settled in January. The visible Chicago painting still has the sense of forms competing and finding balance as the eye moves across it.
The paper study also complicates the idea that “improvisation” means a single unplanned act. Kandinsky could prepare a design and still want the work to carry an immediate, inward force. His account of feeling compelled to weight the corners gives a specific example: the choice had a structural result, but he remembered it as a response made during painting rather than as obedience to a dry formula. The work was constructed and felt. [3]; [7].
Placing it among Kandinsky's 1913 works
The same year, Kandinsky made the vast Composition VII. The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition catalogue documents numerous studies for that painting and the complexity of its final arrangement. Improvisation No. 30 is smaller and carries a more specific visible motif in its cannons, but both works show how far Kandinsky could move beyond a stable landscape while continuing to use or transform recognisable traces. The categories “Composition” and “Improvisation” describe different artistic approaches; they do not divide his work into wholly planned and wholly unplanned pictures. [4]; [1].
Another 1913 work, Painting with White Border, makes a different use of an enclosed field. The Guggenheim's conservation account draws attention to its deliberately white boundary and to varied surfaces produced through Kandinsky's material choices. Beside it, Improvisation No. 30 appears less contained: dense corners hold the image, but coloured forms and dark lines press against and across its square. Comparing the works helps show that “abstract Kandinsky” was not one repeated solution. He could produce a strong border in one canvas and a field of pressures in another. [5]; [1].
These comparisons also help put the word “cannons” in proportion. The painting's title names a striking part, while its arrangement participates in the broader questions Kandinsky was working through in 1913: how colour can bear weight, how an edge can contain or release movement, and how an image can retain a memory of objects without depending on a realistic scene. The answers differ from picture to picture. This one lets the viewer encounter the artillery, then asks what happens when attention returns to the blue centre and the unequal corners.
What the early disagreement teaches us
Eddy's account preserves a disagreement that is still useful. Viewers who called the painting a war picture were not inventing the cannons. Kandinsky, in turn, was not pretending that the artillery was invisible. They differed over what should carry the most interpretive weight. One group began with a recognisable detail and built a story outward. The artist began with the pressure, balance and colours of the whole, treating the detail as one element within it. Both readings have something visible to point to; neither should be repeated without examining the canvas. [2].
That disagreement makes Improvisation No. 30 an especially clear introduction to Kandinsky's passage toward abstraction. The work has not discarded all objects. Instead, it tests how far they can be displaced from the centre of a painting's meaning. A cannon can be named, yet the blue form beside it can change the effect of that name. A seeming tower can tilt, but its diagonal also belongs to a larger rhythm of lines. This is a change in the role of depicted things, not a simple contest between recognising objects and failing to recognise them.
The early London and Chicago discussions matter for the same reason. They show that the issue was present when the work was new, before later histories could label it a settled milestone of abstract art. Eddy had to explain why he found colour and composition worth prolonged attention, even while he acknowledged that many people first saw a battlefield. The painting still gives today's viewer that choice of starting points. Its achievement is to make each starting point lead to more looking. [2]; [2].
Looking again
Begin with the cannons at lower right, as the title invites. Then move to the large blue shape at the centre. It seems to spread across several areas rather than behaving as a small object fired from a barrel. Follow the red and yellow arcs above it, and finally check the corners. Are they heavier than the middle, as Kandinsky believed? Does the blue alter the mood set by the dark artillery? Those questions make his 1914 explanation something to test rather than a label that settles the painting in advance.
The work remains powerful because the obvious and the elusive stay together. Its cannons are not imaginary, and neither is the active organisation of its colour. Eddy's early viewers, the artist's letter and the surviving study give us several ways to approach the image without forcing one to cancel the others. Improvisation No. 30 is a record of Kandinsky making the visible world part of a new kind of pictorial experience.
Kandinsky artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
The Art Institute dates the finished oil to 1913. Lenbachhaus dates its related study to January of that year, and the finished painting was exhibited in London in July 1913. [1]; [3].
No. It predates the war's outbreak in 1914. Kandinsky acknowledged that contemporary war talk may have helped bring the cannons into the picture, but he said he had not intended a representation of war. [7].
Look toward the lower right, where dark wheels and angled forms sit among warm and pale colours. Eddy's 1914 account also describes two cannons and blue forms that viewers took for smoke. [2].
No. It is a related January 1913 work on paper, about 53 cm square, made in gouache, watercolour, ink and chalk. The finished painting is a 111 cm square oil on canvas in Chicago. [3]; [1].
Discussion
What do you notice first in Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons)? Share a close observation or a question about the evidence for this work.
Comments are for comparing what we see and what the cited sources establish.
Reader Insights
Where do you notice the cannons after first taking in the blue centre?
How does Eddy’s 1914 reading differ from Kandinsky’s explanation printed in the same book?
What detail in the preparatory study would you compare with the finished canvas?
Join the Conversation
Add your observation below and tell us which part of the artwork led you to it.
References
- Art Institute of Chicago, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), artwork 8991, collection data and provenance; archived museum essay and exhibition history. View source 1 · View source 2.
- Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (1914), discussion of the painting and Kandinsky's letter, pp. 124–26; London exhibition account. View source 1 · View source 2.
- Lenbachhaus, Entwurf zu “Improvisation 30 (Kanonen)”, January 1913 preparatory work. View source.
- Museum of Modern Art, Kandinsky: Compositions exhibition catalogue, comparison with Composition VII. View source.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Painting with White Border conservation account, comparison with another 1913 canvas. View source.
- Heidelberg University Library, digitised 1912 Über das Geistige in der Kunst, contemporary theoretical context. View source.
- Eddy, Kandinsky letter as printed in 1914. View source.
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