In terms of size, amount of preparatory work, complexity of themes, subjective involvement, and, not least, as an objective pictorial entity Composition VII must be considered Kandinsky's masterpiece. Without doubt it is the acme of his artistic achievements during the period in Munich.

Excluding the sketches and studies for Composition VI (whose elements of Deluge and Resurrection also figure in Composition VII} there are about fifteen versions of related subjects in such different media as glass paintings, drawings, watercolors, woodcuts, and oils. These all center around eschatological themes. For Composition VII alone we know of over thirty drawings and watercolors, some of them detailed studies that recall those drawings of the old masters with minute representations of folds, foliage, or limbs of the human body. There are sheets which invariably repeat, up to ten times, one single curved line; others show schematic outlines of the main structural elements of the composition; still others contain detailed plans for preparing the canvas. Further, there are at least ten large studies in oil, some of them difficult to identify as belonging to Composition VII but all of them doubtlessly related to it either by their inscriptions or by their morphological facts.

On November 25, 1913, Münter noted in her diary that the canvas for Composition VII had arrived after dinner and that Kandinsky had started to work the same evening. The next morning she took the first photograph of the painting and in the afternoon the second one. Her diary entry on the 28th recorded that the painting had been completed. The following morning she took a photograph of the final state. The birth of a great masterpiece had to be documented.

In Kandinsky's own mind the completion of the painting, in 1913, must have been the culmination of what he had defined as a Composition in 1909—that is, the expression of events of an inner nature that would continue to grow very slowly within him until he made the first sketches, which he would then most critically scrutinize and almost pedantically work on. In contrast to his Im- pressions and Improvisations these Compositions, he added, were the sum total of reason, consciousness, determination, and expediency.

As can be traced by the genesis of Composition VII, such ideas and episodes as the Last Judgment, the Resurrection, the Deluge, the salvation of Jonah from the whale, and the Ascension of Elijah, and such motifs as the representation of a dead monk in his megaloschismo have been synthesized in a new concept, metaphysical in nature, and transformed by Kandinsky into an ecstatic and altogether original image for which he created his own abstract form of communication.

As a result, the painting is like a gigantic sphinxlike enigma, a secret communicated by secrets. In its cacophonic turbulence it seems to embrace the most contradictory elements—small and large, soft and hard, calm and wild, currents and undercurrents, zephyrs and hurricanes—thus creating an unexpected harmony of an infinite number of motifs and expressions. Although the painting has been constructed in the most meticulous fashion, it has retained—miraculously—all the freshness of the happy inspiration of the moment, the vivacity of the brush- strokes appearing as spontaneous as if they were unpremeditated.