Purpose
When I am old,
I’ll plant a garden.
I’ll plant flowers
to please my eye
and herbs for my nose.
Lilacs and pansies,
chrysanthemums,
blue rosemary,
and mint and thyme,
pollen palaces
for hungry bees
and petal mansions
for dragonflies.
Murnau Garden -- Wassily Kandinsky
When I am old,
I’ll plant a garden.
I’ll plant flowers
to please my eye
and herbs for my nose.
Lilacs and pansies,
chrysanthemums,
blue rosemary,
and mint and thyme,
pollen palaces
for hungry bees
and petal mansions
for dragonflies.
Murnau Garden -- Wassily Kandinsky
Murnau am Staffelsee is a market town in Bayern (Bavaria), Germany, about 70 km (43 mi) south of Munchen (Munich). Its name comes from Mure ("mudslide") and Aue ("meadow"), referring to the Murnauer Moos (the largest continuous wetland of its kind in Central Europe) and Loisachtal, the valley formed by the Loisach river (which took its name from the the Indo-European "leubh" [sweet]). Wassily Kandinsky traveled to the Vologda region north of Moscow in 1889 when he was 26 and was so struck by the colorful buildings, remarking that entering them was like moving into a painting. In 1910, in "Du Spirituel dans l’art" (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), he wrote, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." At 30 he abandoned teaching law and economics at the Tartu Ülikool (the University of Tartu in Estonia) to enter the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (Academy of Fine Arts, Munich) and encountered Claude Monet's 1890 series of paintings "Les Meules à Giverny." He recalled the epiphany: "That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor." (He was credited with creating, in 1910, one of the 1st purely abstract paintings.) In 1901 he founded Phalanx, an avant garde artists' collective, which was joined by 25-year-old Gabriele Münter. Kandinsky was the first teacher to take her ability seriously. "My main difficulty was I could not paint fast enough. My pictures are all moments of life -- I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of swimming." In the summer of 1902 he invited her to join him at his summer painting classes in Murnau, and their relationship soon became more personal than professional until they separated in 1914 (though he was married). In 1908 they were joined by Russian emigres Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, and the 2 couples frequently painted together until 1914, when World War II began. This prewar period is often called the "Murnau Era."
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