Binz on Rugen

Catalogue particulars

The object is catalogued under the title "Binz on Rugen" and is dated 1901. The attribution recorded with the file is to Wassily Kandinsky. The same record gives the dimensions as 33 cm by 24 cm. These particulars belong to a single descriptive record, a Wikimedia Commons file page whose annotation identifies it as a discovery aid rather than an official museum record; that qualification should travel with the attribution, the title and the measurements in any reuse of them. Nothing in the supplied evidence establishes the support, the inscription, an accession number or a provenance history, so those elements of a full catalogue entry remain open.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The subject is a scene at Binz on the island of Rügen, on the German coast, as the record states, and the composition is legible in those terms. A solitary figure seen from behind, wearing a yellow hat and a pink top, stands at the shoreline facing the water. A dense field of blue, red, pink, ochre and white stones is laid in thick dabs, producing an animated surface rhythm and making the artist's handling of colour readable across the foreground. A large rounded boulder in the nearer ground carries swirling dark blue, black and brown strokes that contrast with the brighter stones around it, while across the turquoise bay a dark wooded headland with exposed ochre and violet cliff faces frames the horizon and fixes the coastal setting. A reddish signature at the lower left against the yellow ground is recorded as supporting the attribution. The physical description therefore corroborates the identification of the place and the presence of the painter's hand, but it does not independently confirm the 1901 date or the 33 by 24 cm measurements, which rest on the catalogue record alone.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The artwork is titled 'Binz on Rugen' and is dated 1901.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The artist is Wassily Kandinsky.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The dimensions are 33 cm by 24 cm.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Composition, setting and handling

Visual observation

The composition is organized around three zones that the recorded description distinguishes clearly. In the foreground, a large rounded boulder is painted with swirling dark blue, black, and brown strokes, and these dark tonal passages are set against bright stones around it, so the boulder reads as a massed, separate form rather than as part of the scatter. Around and in front of it lies a dense field of blue, red, pink, ochre, and white stones, rendered in thick dabs that create an animated surface rhythm and make the artist's handling of color legible as a sequence of discrete touches. Beyond this near ground, a turquoise bay opens toward a dark, wooded headland whose exposed cliff faces are described as ochre and violet; the headland both identifies the coastal setting and frames the horizon. Within this arrangement a solitary figure in a yellow hat and pink top stands at the shoreline, seen from behind. The scene depicted is identified as Binz on the island of Rügen, Germany, and the work is executed in oil.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Interpretation

Among these elements, only some belong to direct observation of the painted surface as recorded, while others are identifications layered onto it. The figure's yellow hat and pink top, her position at the shoreline and her orientation away from the viewer, the dark swirls of the boulder, the color range of the stone field, and the headland with its ochre and violet faces are all described as visible features. The naming of the place as Binz on Rügen is a documented identification of the setting rather than a reading of paint alone, and it is what allows the wooded headland and turquoise bay to be understood as a specific coast rather than an unnamed shoreline. The observation that the headland "identifies the coastal setting and frames the horizon" likewise joins a visual function, framing, to a geographic one. Keeping these levels distinct matters for how the picture is used as evidence: the composition can be described from the surface, but its anchorage in a named Baltic resort on Rügen depends on the external identification of the subject.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Signature and attribution

Visual observation

The attribution is supported by a visible mark as well as by external record. A reddish signature is visible at the lower left of the composition, set against the yellow ground, and this inscription is described as supporting the attribution of the work. The signature therefore functions as internal visual evidence that can be checked against the documented title, artist, date and medium supplied for the painting. Because the surviving description does not transcribe the inscription's wording or detail its condition, the signature's evidential weight here rests on its presence and placement at lower left rather than on a reading of its text.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Interpretation

Taken together, the described features make the painting a compact study in the separation of near and far through color and touch. The thick dabs of the stone field and the swirling dark strokes of the boulder concentrate attention and texture at the closest plane, while the smoother expanse of the turquoise bay and the darker mass of the headland establish distance. The solitary figure, small against the bay and headland and turned away from the viewer, sits between the busy shore and the framed horizon. This reading is an interpretation of the recorded arrangement rather than a claim about the artist's intentions, and it should be weighed as such; what the evidence establishes is the arrangement of these elements and their described contrasts, not the meaning the painter assigned to them.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Visual observation

A solitary figure in a yellow hat and pink top stands at the shoreline, seen from behind.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

A large rounded boulder in the foreground is painted with swirling dark blue, black, and brown strokes, contrasting with bright stones around it.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

A dense field of blue, red, pink, ochre, and white stones rendered in thick dabs creates an animated surface rhythm and reveals the artist's handling of color.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

A dark, wooded headland with exposed ochre and violet cliff faces appears across the turquoise bay, identifying the coastal setting and framing the horizon.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

A reddish signature is visible at the lower left against the yellow ground, supporting the attribution.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Documented Identification and Its Limits

Visual observation

The subject of this oil painting is a beach scene at Binz, on the island of Rügen, on the German Baltic coast. The Wikimedia Commons file record that supplies the object's basic data gives the work the title Binz on Rugen, dates it 1901, names Wassily Kandinsky as the artist, identifies the medium as oil, records dimensions of 33 by 24 cm, and lists the painting as in the collection of Christie's, New York City. These particulars establish what the object is taken to be and where it is currently recorded, but they do not by themselves document who commissioned the work, under what circumstances it was made, or the route by which it reached its present holding. Because the record is a discovery aid rather than an official museum catalogue entry, the commissioning history of a small coastal panel of this kind should be treated as unsettled until documentary or institutional records supply it. What can be said with the available evidence is narrower and firmer: a dated oil view of a named German seaside resort, signed by its maker.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The Painted Scene and the Social World of the Resort

Interpretation

The choice of Binz as subject situates the painting within the leisure culture of the German Baltic coast at the turn of the twentieth century. The figure is presented as a holidaymaker at the water's edge, and the painting's attention falls as much on the shore she stands on, its stones rendered with conspicuous variety of color and touch, as on any narrative incident. In this reading the object belongs less to the tradition of portraiture or narrative genre than to the depiction of summer resort life, where a named beach and a single anonymous bather or stroller supply the human scale. The evidence does not identify the figure, name a patron, or establish whether the scene records a particular visit, so the social content is inferred from the depicted setting rather than documented in the record, and the interpretation should be weighed accordingly.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Form, Locale and the Larger History of Coastal Painting

The object matters within a broader material and art-historical account because it joins a specific, named locale to a small-scale oil format of modest dimensions, 33 by 24 cm, painted in 1901 and carrying the artist's reddish signature at the lower left. A signed, dated coastal view of this size can function as a record of a place, as a marketable picture, and as an exercise in the coloristic handling of stone, water and cliff. The available evidence supports the first two functions only by implication and documents the third visually; it does not record an exhibition history, a provenance chain, or critical reception. The painting's significance therefore rests on what the file establishes about its subject, date, maker, medium and dimensions, together with what can be seen in its composition, and later accounts or fuller institutional records would be needed before any further claim about its place in the artist's development or in the collecting of Baltic resort views could be sustained.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The painting depicts a scene at Binz on the island of Rügen, Germany.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The Documented Medium

The technical record for this painting establishes one basic material fact: the work is executed in oil. The medium is recorded in the same source that supplies the title Binz on Rugen, the date 1901, the attribution to Wassily Kandinsky, the dimensions of 33 by 24 cm and the collection history at Christie's, New York. Because that source is a Wikimedia Commons file page described as a discovery aid rather than an official museum record, the oil medium should be treated as a documented but not independently corroborated statement in the present evidence. No support type, ground, canvas weave, stretcher, primer or varnish is specified anywhere in the supplied units, and none should be inferred from the reproduction alone.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

What the Materials Evidence Supports

Interpretation

Taken together, the evidence supports a limited but useful account of how the picture was made. The documented oil medium and the described thick, dabbed handling of the stones, the swirling darker strokes of the boulder, the palette of yellow, pink, turquoise, ochre and violet, and the reddish signature at lower left form a consistent picture of a small, directly painted coastal scene in which surface touch carries much of the visual interest. The qualifying point is evidential rather than aesthetic: every statement about technique here derives from viewing and from a secondary descriptive record, not from sampling, cross-section or imaging, so questions of ground preparation, pigment identification and layer structure remain open. Within a larger history of materials, that gap is itself informative, since it shows how much of a painting's making can be described from its surface and how much still depends on technical study the present record does not include.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The medium is oil.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The Object and Its Recorded Display

Wassily Kandinsky's oil painting Binz on Rugen is dated 1901 and measures 33 by 24 cm. The Wikimedia Commons file record consulted for this account states that the work is in the collection of Christie's, New York City, United States. That single collection statement is the whole of the display history supplied here: no accession number, gallery installation, loan, or exhibition history accompanies it, and the Commons page is described as a discovery aid rather than an official museum record. Any account of how the picture has been shown must therefore begin and end with the reported Christie's, New York location, treated as a documented but thinly sourced fact rather than as a fully traced provenance.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The same record supplies the descriptive claims that would allow the painting to be identified and compared across collections: the medium is oil, the subject is a scene at Binz on the island of Rügen, Germany, and a reddish signature is visible at the lower left against the yellow ground, supporting the attribution to Kandinsky. The signature is the only internal mark of authorship noted, and it is reported rather than independently examined here. The title, date, medium, dimensions, and collection statement all come from one Commons file page consulted only in part, so they stand as a coherent but single-sourced set of identification data for an object whose physical whereabouts are otherwise undocumented in the supplied evidence.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

What the Image Shows

The recorded visual description places a solitary figure in a yellow hat and pink top at the shoreline, seen from behind and facing the water. In the foreground a large rounded boulder is painted with swirling dark blue, black, and brown strokes that contrast with the bright stones around it, while a dense field of blue, red, pink, ochre, and white stones is rendered in thick dabs that create an animated surface rhythm and reveal the artist's handling of color. Across a turquoise bay a dark, wooded headland with exposed ochre and violet cliff faces identifies the coastal setting and frames the horizon. These observations describe the composition as seen in reproduction; they do not by themselves establish when or where the canvas was made or how it entered the Christie's collection.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Interpretation

Read together, the signature at the lower left and the described scene at Binz support the identification of the work as Kandinsky's 1901 view of the Rügen coast, but the descriptive and the documentary evidence answer different questions. The scene and the mark of the brush describe what the painted surface contains; the collection statement describes where the object is reported to be held. Neither confirms the other, and neither supplies an owner, a sale, or a date of acquisition. The value of the record for a history of collecting lies precisely in this gap: it documents the picture's presence in a Christie's, New York context while leaving the route by which it arrived there unrecorded.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The painting is in the collection of Christie's, New York City, United States.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The Identification Base

Interpretation

The Wikimedia Commons file page that supplies this painting's core identification describes an oil painting by Wassily Kandinsky titled Binz on Rugen, dated 1901, measuring 33 by 24 cm, and lists Christie's, New York City, United States, as the holding collection. The same page identifies the subject as a scene at Binz on the island of Rügen, Germany, and records a reddish signature at the lower left against the yellow ground, which the page treats as supporting the attribution. This is the only primary evidence unit supplied for the section, and it is a discovery aid rather than an official museum or auction-house record: the annotation characterizes artist, title, date, and collection status as resting on that kind of page. Any account of the work's value has to begin from these identification facts, because they are precisely the facts an appraisal would need to confirm.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The calculation states plainly what it is. Its working insurance range is US$1.5 million to US$5 million, recorded as a working calculation generated on 2026-10-30. It describes itself as a broad, conservative order-of-magnitude range prepared for manual review, explicitly not a comparable-sales derivation. It is not an official insurance value, not an appraisal, not an auction estimate or result, and not a sale price. The model-generated document also states that the supplied source gives no transaction, estimate, acquisition, or valuation figure, and that no market data, provenance, condition record, or official Christie's record was supplied. The range is therefore deliberately wide and anchored only to broad attributes of the work rather than to any transaction.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

The factors the calculation says it used are worth separating from the factors it says it lacked. On the side of support, the document names an early 1901 oil by Kandinsky, described as a major modern artist; a small scale of 33 by 24 cm; a Post-Impressionist beach subject at Binz on Rügen; and the reddish signature at lower left. On the side of absence, it records no comparable sales, no provenance, no condition assessment, and no private insurance records. It also flags medium confidence for artist, title, date, and collection status, noting possible alternate titles such as Beach of Rugen. The range should be read as an order-of-magnitude placeholder shaped by those named attributes, not as a market measurement of them. Whether a small early oil on canvas by a major artist commands the low or high end of such a bracket is exactly the question the missing comparable data would answer.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Status of the Figure

The document's own remedy is explicit: the working range should be replaced by a documented appraisal or official insurance schedule before use, and confirmed through a qualified appraiser together with documented condition and provenance review. Read within the framework of an accumulating research archive, the valuation unit is best understood as a record of process rather than a statement about the painting's worth. It documents the fact that, at the time of compilation, no official valuation evidence had been assembled, and it preserves the assumptions that would have to be tested. As with any such working figure, documentation should supersede the estimate rather than supplement it when it arrives.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)

Working estimate

Calculated working insurance estimate, not a sale price: Working insurance range: US$1.5M to US$5M Recorded date: Working calculation, generated 2026-10-30. Methodology: This is a broad, conservative order-of-magnitude working range for manual review, not a comparable-sales derivation. It reflects only the confirmed excerpt context: an early (1901) oil painting by Wassily Kandinsky, a major modern artist, at a small scale of 33 x 24 cm, showing a Post-Impressionist beach scene at Binz on Rugen, with a reddish signature at lower left. The Wikimedia Commons excerpt lists Christie's as the holding collection and references wassilykandinsky.net, but it provides no transaction, estimate, acquisition, or valuation figure. Because no market data, provenance, condition record, or official Christie's record was supplied, the range is intentionally wide and anchored only to the artist's significance, the early date, the oil medium, and the modest scale. It should be replaced by a documented appraisal or official insurance schedule before use. Qualification: This is a model-generated working insurance range for manual review only. It is not an official insurance value, an appraisal, an auction estimate or result, or a sale price. The supplied source is a discovery aid and not an official museum or Christie's record; artist, title, date, and collection status are at medium confidence with possible alternate titles such as Beach of Rugen. No comparable sales, provenance, condition, or private insurance records were available, and no claim is made to such data. Confirm through a qualified appraiser and documented condition and provenance review.(Wikimedia Commons: Binz on Rugen, 1901, n.d.)