Nel cerchio

Kandinsky made this sheet in Munich in 1913 or 1914, in watercolour, gouache and Chinese ink on sepia paper, with the forms gathered inside a circle, as the title says. He had arrived from Moscow in 1896 to study art and had stayed nearly twenty years. When Germany declared war on Russia in August 1914 he became an enemy alien in the city he had worked in for half his adult life, and he left within days for Switzerland. He was back in Moscow before the end of the year, with a great deal of his work still in Bavaria. This one came to Paris in 1981, in the bequest his widow Nina made to the French state, which is why so much of Kandinsky now hangs at the Pompidou.