The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wassily Kandinsky · Einige Kreise · oil on a single square canvas · circles of many sizes and colours, and no other form, on a dark clouded ground, the largest of them black inside a blue-violet corona · 1926, in the years the painter taught at the Bauhaus · Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection · the one canvas scored as it stands, whole; nothing in it has been replaced or dispersed
Mode
Non-objective painting of one form; a late refinement of the painter’s geometric language, in which geometry becomes space rather than diagram
Mythos
The heavens and the eclipse: the circle as sun, moon and sphere, a dark sun with light escaping round its edge; evoked more than built
Phase
One canvas of 1926, from the years the painter taught at the Bauhaus, the year of Point and Line to Plane, at the end of a run of circle pictures begun in 1923
Presentation
Oil on a single square canvas; flat discs of colour, transparent where they overlap, on a worked dark ground; one graded corona; no line and no angle
Register
A cool, cosmic hush; one summit in the eclipse and a sustained quiet around it, with no terror
Scale
One square field with no up or down, its circles running from the black disc in its corona to points of colour, over a dark ground whose depth has no floor
Governing Proposition
A square canvas of 1926 holds circles and nothing else: no line, no angle, no second form. On a dark ground clouded toward grey-blue, discs of every size in red, yellow, blue, green, violet, pink and white float with no grid, and where two overlap the shared lens takes a third colour while both stay whole. Upper left of centre the largest circle is black, ringed by a soft blue-violet corona, and reads at once as an eclipse. The wager of the canvas is that the most elementary form, varied only in size, hue and place, can carry tension, balance and a sense of the heavens on its own, and that forms can pass through one another without losing themselves.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Wassily Kandinsky painted Several Circles, in German Einige Kreise, in 1926, in the years he taught at the Bauhaus. It is oil on a single square canvas, and it belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. The work here is the one canvas as it stands, whole: nothing in it has been replaced, and nothing has been dispersed. Around it stand the other circle pictures he painted from 1923 to 1926, among them Circles in a Circle of 1923, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; his Bauhaus teaching; and the book he published in the same year, Point and Line to Plane, the ninth of the Bauhaus Books. They are context, and none of them is scored.
The ground is dark, near black, clouded toward grey-blue at the upper right, its surface uneven and breathing rather than a flat fill. Upper left of centre lies the largest circle, black, ringed by a soft blue-violet corona that fades into the ground. Around it and across it are circles of every size, in red, yellow, blue, green, violet, pink and white, scattered with no grid, many of them overlapping. Where two overlap, the lens they share is painted in a third colour, so that the discs read as transparent and both stay whole. There is no line on the canvas, no angle and no second form: only circles, their colours and the intervals between them, on a dark field.
Taken apart disc by disc, the canvas shows which parts it needs. The black circle and its corona cannot go: it is the picture’s weight, its darkness made into a body, and without it the field would be confetti on a ground. The large discs that cross or touch it cannot go, because their overlaps are where the principle of the picture is shown, and the dark ground cannot go, because it is the space the discs float in and the cause of their glow. What yields is the swarm of small discs. Their number and their places look searched for balance rather than compelled by it, and two or three could move or vanish without the picture ceasing to be itself.
Movement II
The black disc in its corona reads at once as an eclipse: a dark sun with light escaping round its edge. It is the strongest single image on the canvas and its centre of weight. Its corona is graded into the ground with a softness found nowhere else in the picture, so that this one disc emits while every other disc reflects. It is the one element that bends the canvas’s law, a radiance rather than a disc, and it bends it from inside: it is a circle’s force made visible.
The rest of the elevation follows from it. The small bright discs glow against the dark as lights in a void, and the clouded ground, worked so that it has depth, opens a space with no floor. The square takes away up and down, so that nothing on the canvas can fall. The register is single, the cool sublime of a night sky, and it is held by one summit, the eclipse, and a sustained quiet around it. There is no terror here and no transport by size, and among the small discs there are passages that please rather than elevate.
The circle is the oldest sign of the whole: the sun, the moon, the heavens, the sphere. The eclipse is an ancient image of dread and of order, and a field of discs in a dark ground is a cosmos. The canvas is built as a heavens, bodies in a void, and that structure carries the archetype. But nothing in it is particular first. A disc is a sign before it is a body, so the forms are archetype from the outset and never become one, and the myth is brought to them by the viewer and by the painter’s doctrine. The orders the canvas holds are few: the heavens, the order of forces among bodies, the eye moving among them, and a spiritual claim that is asserted more than seen.
Movement III
Where two discs overlap, a third colour appears, and both discs remain whole. This is the canvas’s principle and its clearest disclosure: forms can pass through one another without losing themselves, a picture of coexistence rather than collision. With it comes a second proposition, that the most elementary form, varied only in size, hue and place, carries tension and balance on its own, so that forms act on one another with no object to carry them. Both hold. Both are propositions about pictorial forces, and beyond them what the canvas gives is a state, a calm and cosmic hush, in which the human condition enters only as the viewer’s contemplation.
What the canvas knows lives in its form. Painted opaque, the discs would stack and hide one another, and the picture would know hierarchy instead of coexistence. On white, as in Kandinsky’s Bauhaus watercolours and prints, the circles are figures on paper; on this clouded dark they are bodies in a depth, and in oil the dark has a body that a print loses. The square removes direction, which a cosmos requires. The form is held below its height only because it restates, at full strength, what the circle studies of 1923 to 1926 had already found.
The transparency is painted, not physical. Each overlap is a colour mixed and set to read as two colours seen through each other, and it reads so across the field. The ground is a worked dark, not a fill; the edges are clean without the deadness of a compass line; and colour is weighed so that no small disc tips the balance of the large. One law governs everything, circles of flat colour acting in a dark space by size, hue, nearness and transparency, and it holds from the largest disc to the smallest. The costs are named: some overlap colours are chosen rather than found and read as a third disc more than as transparency, the range of mark is narrow by design, and one form is the narrowest territory a painting can choose.
Movement IV
In the year of the canvas Kandinsky published his theory in Point and Line to Plane, and theory and picture stand side by side. Which serves which is not settled: the canvas can be read as an image of the heavens or as a demonstration of the book. In a letter of about 1930 to Will Grohmann he gave his reasons for the circle, here in paraphrase: that it is the most modest of forms and yet asserts itself; that it is stable and unstable at once, loud and soft at once; that it is a single tension carrying countless tensions, a synthesis of the greatest oppositions; and that of the three primary forms it points most clearly to a fourth dimension.
The circle came to him from more than one side. From outside, there were the discs of Delaunay’s simultaneous paintings from about 1912, Kupka’s discs, and the compass-drawn circles of Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitzky, which Kandinsky knew at first hand in Moscow before 1922. From inside, there was his own turn to geometry from about 1921: the circle is already a principal form in Composition VIII and in Circles in a Circle, both of 1923. By 1926 the form had been his for some years, and others had used it before him.
The departure is to cut the vocabulary to that one form, drop line and angle, make the discs transparent and set them on a dark atmospheric ground, so that geometry becomes space rather than diagram. It is a real refinement and a recognisable turn, a clear and finished statement of the single-form painting, made inside an abstraction he and others had opened a decade before. The stake was small: a master at the Bauhaus consolidating his own late language, with nothing risked. Malevich’s Black Square, which stands at 8.3, is the swerve of one elementary form; Several Circles is the cultivation of a language that swerve opened.
Movement V
The canvas came into the collection on which the Guggenheim was founded, and with it into the programme of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting from 1939. Through that collection it helped make Kandinsky the American type of non-objective art. The circle as a sufficient subject returns in later painting, in the targets and discs of the 1950s and 1960s, though the line from this canvas to them is general rather than traceable. As an image, in reproduction, its reach is wide.
It has kept a century in one public collection and has never been dispersed. The image is whole, and no later hand on it can be named. The Guggenheim rotates its collection, so the canvas has not been continuously on view, and its presence, though wide, is not the widest; its condition in detail is not known here, and no loss is charged against it and none credited to it. The surface is fixed to no moment. The circles of 1926 look no more dated than the circle.
Its questions stay open: cosmic image or pictorial theory; the fourth dimension as doctrine, metaphor or claim; overlap colours set by a system, the Bauhaus colour teaching or his own correspondences of form and colour, or judged by eye; its standing beside Delaunay. Many of them belong to the circle period rather than to this canvas, and the writing on it alone is thinner than on the major Compositions. Composition VII, the canvas of 1913, stands at 8.7, the breakthrough well above the late refinement. The canvas holds no person, city, labour, family, state or history. It holds the heavens, and one black circle in a blue-violet corona that still reads, at first sight, as an eclipse.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, disc by disc. The black circle in its corona cannot go: it is the picture’s weight, its darkness made into a body, and without it the field would be confetti on a ground. The large discs that cross or touch it cannot go, because the transparencies where they overlap are where the picture’s principle is shown. The dark, clouded ground cannot go: it is the space the discs float in, and it gives them their glow. What yields is the swarm of small discs. Their number and places look searched for balance rather than compelled by it: two or three could move or vanish and the picture would remain itself. One form in many sizes has fewer required parts than it seems.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What is disclosed through the image is credited in full, and two things can be stated that hold. First, that the most elementary form, varied only in size, hue and place, carries tension and balance on its own: the canvas is a proof that forms act on one another with no object to carry them. Second, that forms can interpenetrate without losing themselves: where two discs overlap a third colour appears and both remain whole, a picture of coexistence rather than collision. These are real propositions, but they are propositions about pictorial forces. Beyond them the canvas gives a state, a calm and cosmic hush, bodies adrift in a night, and the human condition enters only as the viewer’s contemplation.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Elevation is real and of one register, the cool sublime of a night sky. It comes first from the black disc in its blue-violet corona, which reads at once as an eclipse, a dark sun with light escaping round its edge: the strongest single image on the canvas. It recurs in the small bright discs, which glow against the dark as lights in a void, and in the clouded ground, which opens a depth with no floor. What holds the axis is the kind and the frequency. There is one summit, the eclipse, and a sustained quiet around it; there is no terror and no transport by size; and among the small discs there are passages that please rather than elevate.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The archetypes are present, and largely evoked. The circle is the oldest sign of the whole: the sun, the moon, the heavens, the sphere. The black disc in its corona is the eclipse, an ancient image of dread and of order. A field of discs in a dark ground is a cosmos, and the painter’s own account of the circle as his link to the cosmic gives that reading authority. Some of it is built: the canvas is constructed as a heavens, bodies in a void, and the structure carries it. But the axis asks for a particular that becomes archetypal while staying particular, and here nothing is particular first. The forms are archetype at the outset, sign before body, and the myth is supplied by the viewer and by the painter’s doctrine.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is double. From outside: the discs of Delaunay’s simultaneous paintings from about 1912, Kupka’s discs, and the compass-drawn circles of Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitzky, which Kandinsky knew at first hand in Moscow before 1922. From inside: his own turn to geometry from about 1921, the circle already a principal form in Composition VIII and Circles in a Circle, both of 1923. The departure: the vocabulary cut to one form, line and angle dropped, the discs made transparent and set on a dark atmospheric ground, so that geometry becomes space rather than diagram. It is a real refinement and a recognisable turn. The stake was small: a master at the Bauhaus consolidating his own late language, with nothing risked.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and much is lost, because what the canvas knows lives in three decisions. The transparency is the knowledge of coexistence: painted opaque, the discs would stack and hide one another, and the picture would know hierarchy instead. The dark ground is the knowledge of space: on white, as in his Bauhaus watercolours and prints, the circles are figures on paper; on this clouded dark they are bodies in a depth. The square removes direction: no up, no down, nothing to fall, which a cosmos requires. In oil the dark ground has a body that a print loses. Held below the top because the form largely restates, at full strength, what the circle studies of 1923 to 1926 had already found.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: a century in a public collection, central to its museum’s founding programme, and returned to as a type of non-objective painting. The open questions are real. Is the canvas cosmic imagery or pictorial theory, an image of the heavens or a demonstration of Point and Line to Plane? Is the fourth dimension the painter claimed for the circle doctrine, metaphor or claim? Do the overlap colours follow a system, the Bauhaus colour teaching or his own correspondences of form and colour, or are they judged by eye? How does the canvas stand to Delaunay? It yields at two distances, as one image and as a field read disc by disc. Held at 8.0 because the literature on this canvas alone is thinner than on the major Compositions, and many of its questions belong to the circle period.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Field: European abstract painting in the 1920s, force and reach scored together. The intrinsic force is the single-form painting, a whole picture built from one elementary shape and its colour relations, on a space that is neither flat ground nor perspective. It is a clear and finished statement, made inside an abstraction that Kandinsky among others had opened a decade before, and it is discounted for Delaunay’s priority with the disc and the Russians’ with the compass circle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in the Guggenheim’s founding collection and the programme of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting from 1939, it helped make Kandinsky the American type of non-objective art; the circle as a sufficient subject returns in the targets and discs of the 1950s and 1960s, by a general line rather than a traceable one; and its reach in reproduction is wide.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred years. Form: one canvas, whole; no part of the image is lost, and no later hand on it can be named. Presence: a century in one public collection, never dispersed, and among the most reproduced of the painter’s late works; but the Guggenheim rotates its collection, so the canvas has not been continuously on view, and its presence, though wide, is not the widest. Fabric: oil on canvas, its condition in detail not known here; no loss is charged and none is credited. The surface is fixed to no moment: the circles of 1926 look no more dated than the circle. Held at the usual figure for a painting of its age, and not lifted for presence.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The transparency is painted, not physical: each overlap is a colour mixed and set to read as two colours seen through each other, and it reads so across the field. The corona of the black disc is graded into the ground with a softness found nowhere else on the canvas, so that one disc emits and the rest reflect. The ground is worked, clouded and uneven, a dark with depth rather than a fill. Edges are clean without the deadness of a compass line, and colour is weighed so that no small disc tips the balance of the large. The costs: some overlap colours are chosen rather than found, reading as a third disc more than a transparency, and the range of mark is narrow by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the black disc in its soft corona, upper left of centre, and a small hard-edged bright disc at the far edge of the field. They obey one law: circles of flat colour in a dark space, acting by size, hue, nearness and transparency, with no line, no angle and no second form. The corona is the one element that bends the law, a radiance rather than a disc, and it is the law’s own extension, a circle’s force made visible. Every other element is the law at some size. The range within it runs from the largest disc to the smallest, from black to white, from emission to reflection, and the law holds. What holds the axis is the territory: narrowness is not coherence, and one form is the narrowest a painting can choose.
Score: 8.5 / 10
An abstract field of one form holds few orders. Here there are four: the heavens, the circle as sun, moon and planet in a void; the order of forces, tension and balance among bodies; consciousness, the eye moving among the discs and reading depth; and the spiritual, the painter’s doctrine of the inner sound of form, present more as doctrine than made visible. The first three are integrated in one structure; the fourth is asserted. Music, so present in Kandinsky’s thought, is not built here as it is in a picture titled for it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no city, no labour, no family, no state and no history. The figure describes the form.
Score: 6.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5 and The Living Form at 8.4. A canvas whole after a century in one public collection, its circles no more dated than the circle; a painted transparency, a corona graded so that one disc emits and the rest reflect, and a worked dark ground; one law, circles of flat colour acting in a dark space, held from the largest disc to the smallest; and a form whose transparency, dark ground and square are what it knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.2: the heavens, the order of forces and the viewer’s eye are held in one structure and the spiritual is asserted, and there is no person, city, labour, family, state or history. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 7.5, and The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 7.6: what is disclosed are propositions about pictorial forces, and beyond them a state; the forms are archetype before they are bodies; and the turn to one form was taken inside a vocabulary others had opened, with nothing at stake.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, The Swerve at 7.6 and The Unconcealment at 7.5 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met at its limit: The Unconcealment stands at 7.5, exactly the threshold, and no other axis it counts falls below 7.6. The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate. The twelve sum to 95.5, an average of 7.96 that displays 8.0, the first figure of Tier IV: two tenths fewer on the sum would place the work in Tier III.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection (Einige Kreise, oil on canvas, 1926), of how it was made and of its later history. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the one painting, on a single square canvas, as it stands: whole, with nothing replaced or dispersed, so nothing stands in place of an original. Kandinsky’s other circle pictures of 1923 to 1926, Circles in a Circle among them, his Bauhaus teaching and Point and Line to Plane (Bauhaus Book 9, 1926) are context and are not scored. No words of the painter’s are quoted beyond the title; his letter to Will Grohmann on the circle is given in paraphrase only, because its wording is known here only in translation. The canvas carries no inscription that is quoted. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the canvas, the number of circles, the exact places of the small discs, the town in which it was painted, the way it came into the collection, its condition and conservation history, and its exhibition record.