Study for Circles on Black

In 1921 Kandinsky was living out his last months in Moscow. He had spent the war and the revolution in Russia, helping to set up the new Soviet art schools and museums, surrounded by younger artists who were pushing painting toward pure geometry. On a sheet washed solid black he floated rings and discs of colour, working out on paper the picture that became the oil now called Circles on Black. The circle was moving to the centre of his art. That December he left Russia for good, and within a year he was teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany, where the circle kept turning up in the middle of one canvas after another.