Centre Circles

June 1932 was the Dessau Bauhaus's last summer. The National Socialists had taken the city council, and on 22 August it voted to shut the school. It closed at the end of September and opened again in a disused telephone factory in Berlin, privately funded, for one more year before closing for good. Kandinsky had taught there since 1922 and went with it. He made this sheet in the middle of that summer, gouache on cardboard, 33 by 48 centimetres, with the circles gathered into the centre and the field around them left thin and pale. It belongs to the Prado and has hung at the Reina Sofia on long-term loan since 2017.