Einige Kreise

In 1926 Kandinsky was 60 and teaching at the Bauhaus, the design school that had just moved into its sleek new home in Dessau. That winter he painted this, holding himself to a single shape, the circle, dozens of them drifting across a near-black field. He had come to love the circle above all other forms, calling it the one that pointed, as he put it, most clearly to the fourth dimension. Some discs overlap like small eclipses, others glow on their own. The dark ground and the scattered rings of colour make the whole canvas read less like a geometry lesson than a patch of night sky with planets loose in it.