The ill-starred love affair between Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter is one of the most intriguing episodes in the history of twentieth-century art - a story of happiness and pain, trust and betrayal, idyllic harmony and bitter conflict, set against the backdrop of the revolutionary upheavals that attended the birth of Modernism.

Living and working together in Munich and in the Bavarian countryside, Kandinsky and Munter jointly became the moving spirits of the Blue Rider school, which pioneered the epochal turn from figurative painting to abstraction. This book traces the development of the couple's personal and artistic relationship from its beginnings in 1902 to the key moment in 1914 when Kandinsky fled Germany and returned to his native Russia, before finally abandoning Munter in 1917.

The fascinating and often moving story of their life together - and of the underlying tensions that eventually drove them apart - is told in letters (some of which are published here for the first time), in diary extracts and memoirs, and in superb reproductions of their finest paintings and sketches.