# Painting with Troika

- By: Vasily Kandinsky (Born Moscow (formerly Russian Empire, now Russia), 1866; died Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1944)
- Date: January 18, 1911
- Medium: Oil on cardboard; in artist's painted frame
- Classification: Painting
- Dimensions: 69.7 × 97.3 cm (27 3/8 × 38 5/16 in.)
- Culture: Germany
- Credit line: Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection
- Museum: [Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/8983)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/a45e5f55-d02b-ce98-8bab-3af549684f58/full/!1920,1080/0/default.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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.

Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0