Several Circles

Author

Abstraction and the avant-garde

Medium

Guggenheim Museum, New York

The work is valuable as a concentrated model of abstract thinking, where movement and music are translated into pure form.

Wassily Kandinsky, Several Circles — Several Circles · Guggenheim Museum, New York

Highlights

Surprising facts & legends

Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.

Interesting facts

The story around the work

Interesting facts & legends

Kandinsky painted this in January 1926 while teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau — the canvas is enormous at 140 x 140 cm, and he reportedly worked on it in a single concentrated stretch over several days.
The Guggenheim acquired it in 1929 directly from Hilla von Rebay, Solomon Guggenheim's art advisor, who personally convinced Guggenheim that Kandinsky was the future of painting — this was one of her first major purchases for what would become the museum.
Kandinsky claimed he literally heard music when he looked at colors, a neurological condition called synesthesia, and the circles here map almost exactly to how he described sustained musical tones in his theoretical treatise Point and Line to Plane, published the same year.
The painting survived the Nazi regime's 1937 purge of "degenerate art" — dozens of Kandinsky's works were confiscated from German museums, but this one was already safely in New York.
Under close examination, art historians have noted that the black ground is not flat: Kandinsky built up the dark field in thin translucent layers, which is why the colored circles appear to glow as if backlit rather than sitting on top of the surface.
When Kandinsky was asked which shape he considered the most perfect, he answered without hesitation: the circle, because it is simultaneously the most stable and the most unstable — it can suggest a planet, a void, or a sound wave depending on context.

Source: Catalog editorial reference

More details Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work

Historical context

Several Circles inside its era

The painting belongs to the mature Bauhaus period, when Kandinsky was deeply investigating geometry and color.

Kandinsky builds a cosmic composition in which the circle becomes form, rhythm, and energetic event at once. The location in Guggenheim Museum, New York matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.

Path to recognition

How the work became widely known

It is known as one of the clearest and most beautiful examples of lyrical geometric abstraction.

Value

Why the work matters now

The work is valuable as a concentrated model of abstract thinking, where movement and music are translated into pure form.

Connections and legacy

How to read the work more broadly

Kandinsky is one of the artists who quite literally changed the alphabet of art. For him, point, line, circle, and color possessed their own emotional and spiritual energy.

Official sources

Where to verify the institutional context

There is no institution link in the registry for this work yet, but the long-form reading below is already composed from the artwork’s history, value, and museum context.

Visual context