About this work
*Around the Circle* (*Autour du cercle*) brings together science-derived biomorphic forms with primary geometric shapes, energetic lines, and a lively pastel palette — along with a curious set of steps leading nowhere — leaving meaning open-ended and free-associative for the viewer. The canvas — nearly a metre tall and nearly one and a half metres wide — operates like a stage crowded with animated characters: small creature-like figures that hover and orbit, never quite settling, never quite resolving into anything literal. The composition combines geometric, abstract, and figurative forms , holding them in productive tension. The palette is warm and weightless — pastels threaded through with sharper, acid notes — giving the whole surface a buoyant, almost celebratory atmosphere that belies the political darkness of the moment in which it was made.
In 1933, Kandinsky was forced to leave Germany due to political pressures, yet his move to Paris ushered in a highly creative period — freed from teaching and administrative responsibilities, he devoted himself entirely to his art.
His use of biomorphic forms in this period attests to a deep fascination with the organic sciences, particularly embryology, zoology, and botany; during his Bauhaus years he had clipped and saved illustrations of microscopic organisms, insects, and embryos, and he owned several important scientific books and encyclopedias from which he derived abstracted depictions of minute creatures, as exemplified in *Around the Circle*, painted between May and August 1940.
Breaking away from the rigidity of Bauhaus geometry, he turned to softer, more malleable forms that often display a whimsical, playful quality.
These buoyant, biomorphic images can be read as signs of an optimistic vision of a peaceful future and hope for social rebirth and regeneration — and the artist himself considered this painting to be one of his most important works of this time.
This is a painting that rewards a room with breathing space — a pale wall, generous natural light, and enough distance to let the eye wander without feeling directed. The natural sciences and the Surrealist movement, as well as an abiding interest in Russian and Siberian cultural practices and folklore, informed the organic imagery and sparked recurring themes of renewal and metamorphosis that pulse through the work — making it feel perpetually alive rather than fixed. It speaks to the viewer who values intellectual wit alongside visual pleasure: someone drawn to work that hides its rigour inside its playfulness. Hung in a study, a living room, or any space where ideas are meant to circulate, *Around the Circle* doesn't impose a mood so much as generate one — curious, optimistic, restless in the best possible sense.
