A street with two tiny dark figures on it curves down through a small town, seen from a window above and painted in long, broad strokes of mauve, violet and ocher. Tall cream and white houses with dark green shutters crowd the left edge, and a bright orange-red roof rises on the right. In between, blue, pink and dark roofs step back toward green fields and low hills at the top of the picture.

This is a landscape, not an abstraction. The Lenbachhaus says Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter returned to Bavaria in 1908 and discovered the small town of Murnau that summer. Kandinsky, Münter and the painters Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin all stayed together there. The museum calls the summer a breakthrough to freer, more expressive painting, with flat shapes reduced to basic forms and intense, contrasting colors beginning to detach from nature.

This was one of the first pictures Kandinsky painted in Murnau, a view from the window of the inn on the Obere Hauptstraße where the four rented rooms. The broad brushstrokes and modeled details of the houses, the museum says, still have a touch of Jugendstil. Münter owned the picture from 1926 and gave it to the city's gallery in 1957. It is in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.