Multicolored Circle

In 1923 a small gallery at 19 East 47th Street in New York gave Kandinsky his first one-man show in the United States, and this canvas hung in it. The rooms belonged to the Société Anonyme, a society for modern art founded three years earlier by the American painter Katherine Dreier together with the artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Kandinsky had painted the picture in 1921, while he was still living in Russia, and it is one of eight major canvases he finished that year. It is large, about 1.4 metres high and 1.8 wide, and entirely geometric, with coloured shapes and long straight bars floating over a pale ground and the circle of the title near the middle. It stayed with the society for 18 years and came to Yale in 1941, when Dreier gave the university its collection.