The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 50 cm sheet
- A 50 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 20 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 5.49 cm above, 6.31 cm below.
- 70 × 70 cm sheet
- A 70 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 28 in. Margins 9.30 cm each side, 10.80 cm above, 12.44 cm below.
- If you mat it
- Cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 37.61 cm for the small sheet, 50.81 × 46.16 cm for the large one. On the large sheet the wide white border already does the work of a mat. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944), Improvisation 35, 1914
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 110.3 × 120.3 cm. Monogrammed and dated lower left: the K inside a rounded triangle, 1914. On the stretcher, in white chalk: KANDINSKY – Improvisation 35 / 1914
- Held by
- Kunstmuseum Basel, gift of Hans Arp, 1966
- Inventory
- G 1966.11
- Rights
- Marked by the museum as public-domain image data («Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel»), free for any use including commercial
- File
- Kunstmuseum Basel, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The paint runs to all four borders of the museum's file; we print the file whole.
- Source
- Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 35, in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Sammlung Online, sammlung.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/de/collection/item/1518, accessed 3 October 2026
The picture Kandinsky made
Nothing in this canvas holds still long enough to be named. A pale, warm ground is overrun from every side: a deep blue oval and a dark bottle-green mass at the upper left, a sweep of yellow arching across the top, a red crescent low on the left, and at the right edge clusters of crimson, white and blue-green that read like foliage or flames. Over all of it run thin black lines – hatchings, loops, short ladders – drawn quickly into the wet colour.
The museum dates the picture to May 1914. Kandinsky signed it with his monogram in the lower left corner and wrote the title on the stretcher in white chalk.
The last Improvisation
From 1909 Kandinsky sorted his pictures into three kinds and named them with words borrowed from music. In On the Spiritual in Art, published in Munich at the end of 1911, he defined them: an Impression records nature directly, an Improvisation is a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of an inner state, a Composition is worked out slowly and deliberately. He numbered the Improvisations as he went. Improvisation 35 is the last of the series.
It is also one of the last pictures of his Munich years. In August 1914, three months after he painted it, war broke out and Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, had to leave Germany; he went first to Switzerland, to Goldach on Lake Constance, and from there back to Russia.
From Der Sturm to Hans Arp
The picture was shown in Berlin in September 1916 at Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm. It later belonged to Hans Arp – sculptor, poet and one of the founders of Dada in Zurich – who left it on deposit at the Kunstmuseum Basel and in 1966, together with Marguerite Arp, gave it to the museum.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.43×
The museum catalogues the canvas at 110.3 × 120.3 cm and serves a file of 6,072 × 5,523 px. Anchored on the catalogued width, as everywhere in this catalogue, that is 50.47 px/cm, or 128 dpi if the picture were printed at original size – far below our floor of 300 dpi, so there is no 1:1 sheet.
At exactly 300 dpi the file carries 51.41 cm of image width, 0.43× the canvas. That is what the 70 × 70 cm sheet prints, one pixel of the museum's file to one pixel of the print, with no scaling at all; the white margins are correspondingly generous. The 50 × 50 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide – 0.35× original, with 367 dpi available. The canvas is close to square, so both sheets are square: on a landscape sheet of 50 cm height the picture would leave less than two centimetres above and below.
A small wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.0994, the catalogued dimensions give 1.0907, 0.80 % apart. Anchored on the width, the printed height corresponds to 109.4 cm of canvas instead of 110.3 – the kind of difference a canvas photographed in its frame loses to the rebate. That is a supposition, not a measurement, and we do not stretch the file to close the gap.
What we measured at the edges
Before printing a museum file whole we check that it really is the picture and not the picture plus a photographer's backdrop. Forty samples along each border, at the outermost pixel row and again eight pixels in. Medians: top 77 and 84 across a range of 28 to 215, bottom 176 and 178 across 71 to 220, left 97 and 105 across 57 to 120, right 104 and 90 across 34 to 209. Every border varies from sample to sample, as painted canvas does and a studio ground does not; at full resolution the weave of the canvas runs right to the edge in all four corners. Nothing is cut away.
What we are allowed to sell
Kandinsky died on 13 December 1944, so the painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1 January 2015.
For the United States we apply the rule we use for every foreign artist of the twentieth century in this catalogue: the work dates from 1930 or earlier, and the museum that owns it publishes it as public domain. Both hold here – painted in 1914, marked «Bilddaten gemeinfrei» by Basel. The museum's records show no reproduction of the picture before 1931; the Berlin exhibition of 1916 was a showing, not a publication. Read as unpublished before 1978, the work has been free in the US since 1 January 2015 (life of the author plus seventy years). The picture was reproduced in books from 1949 on; were one of those taken as its first publication, the US term would run longer. We state that possibility rather than hide it.
At the reproduction level the Kunstmuseum Basel marks this object as public-domain image data and allows it to be shared, used for any purpose – commercial included – and edited, without asking. The painting is a flat work, so in none of our markets does a separate right arise in the photograph. The museum asks that the artist, title and source be named with a link, and that its logo never be used; both are done above. The museum is our source, not our partner.
A note on colour, and one on choosing
Measured from the museum file, downsampled to 240 × 218 px: 89.0 % of the pixels carry colour, and within that warm tones account for 65.6 %, blue 17.9 %, green 11.3 %, violet 5.2 %. Raising the saturation threshold to 0.15 and 0.25 moves the warm share to 66.1 % and 66.9 %. Filed under Paintings and Warm Tones.
Which size: the small sheet is a picture for a desk wall or a hallway, read from a metre away. The large one, with its wide white border, wants a wall of its own – above a sideboard, a sofa or a bed.