Color Study, Squares with Concentric Circles

This was working material, not a picture meant for a wall. Kandinsky laid out these twelve squares in Munich in 1913 to test what happens when rings of colour sit inside one another and then next to a different set, in watercolour, gouache and chalk on a sheet about the size of a page of writing paper. In August 1914 the war made him an enemy alien in Germany overnight. He left within days for Switzerland and then Russia, and the contents of his studio stayed with the painter Gabriele Münter. She kept them. Through the 1930s, while the regime was pulling his work out of German museums as degenerate, she hid the hoard in the cellar of her house at Murnau in the Alpine foothills. She gave it to the city of Munich in 1957, on her eightieth birthday, and the sheet still carries her initials in its inventory number.