Circle (with brown)

By 1929 Kandinsky had been teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau for four years, living in one half of a white semi-detached house Walter Gropius had built for the school's masters. Paul Klee had the other half. Each man painted his own rooms to his own colour scheme, and the studios were the largest spaces in the building, about 45 square metres each. Circles had taken over Kandinsky's painting in those Dessau years, and he kept setting them against straight edges and triangles to watch what each did to the other. The title he gave this one is plainly descriptive, Kreis mit Braun, circle with brown. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires still lists it under that German name.