A Circle (A)

Kandinsky painted this in January 1928. Three months later, on 4 April, he put a staging of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition on at the Friedrich Theatre in Dessau, the town where he was then teaching. Coloured shapes moved on and off in time with the piano and the hall lighting shifted constantly to his written instructions, which made the thing awkward to run. It was the only one of his theatre projects ever performed. Seventeen watercolours and drawings for it survive, along with a piano score that belonged to his assistant Felix Klee, son of the painter Paul Klee.

The canvas is small, 35 by 25 centimetres. He inscribed it Ein Kreis a with the number 420, its place in the running list he kept of his own paintings. His widow Nina held on to it for the rest of her life, and it reached the Pompidou in her bequest of 1981.