Cerchi in un cerchio

Kandinsky painted this in 1923, soon after joining the Bauhaus, the design school in Weimar that was trying to rebuild German art and craft after the First World War. He had spent the war years back in his native Russia and returned to Germany in 1921 with his loose, stormy early abstraction hardening into something built with ruler and compass. Here 26 coloured circles overlap inside one heavy black ring, crossed by straight lines. He wrote to a friend that it was the first of his pictures to put the circle in the foreground, and the shape became a near obsession for him afterwards. For Kandinsky the circle was not decoration but a form he treated almost as a living thing, most alive where two crossing beams of colour meet near the centre.