The Moscow-born artist Wassily Kandinsky, along with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee, is one of the most important contributors to the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century. Kandinsky and Klee were, in fact, fellow students in the Munich Academy, and it was from Munich's Jugendstil art nouveau milieu at the turn of the century that Kandinsky's lyrical early style developed. Kandinsky painted The Waterfall at a turning point when he was transforming his naturalist landscapes into the abstract compositions for which he is best known. Inspired by the German countryside of Murnau, near Munich, Kandinsky playfully distorted the landscape's natural forms to the limits of figuration, creating a fantastical scene that foreshadows the artist's later lyrical abstractions. The bold color palette of The Waterfall pays tribute to the French Fauvist artists whom Kandinsky admired on his multiple stays in Paris from 1904 to 1906.