Kleine Welten (Small Worlds), plate 4,

1922

Exemplifying a pivotal moment in Kandinsky’s shift towards geometric abstraction, this vibrant lithograph belongs to a portfolio of twelve prints the artist made soon after he began teaching at the Bauhaus, a school for modern art and architecture in Weimar, Germany.
The portfolio’s overarching title reflects Kandinsky’s proclamation that “to create a work of art is to create the world,” with each composition serving as a self-contained microcosm of line, plane, and color. Anchored by the dominant thick black outline of a circle, the swirling composition merges nonobjective shapes with recognizable motifs—such as a checkerboard, a propeller, and green grass—in a process the artist referred to as the “veiling of images.”