During the 1920s, Vasily Kandinsky was one of the most influential instructors at the Bauhaus, the experimental art school founded at Weimar, then later reestablished at Dessau. Previously in his native Russia during and after World War I, while under the influence of Constructivists Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, the artist began to move away from the freewheeling and organic abstraction of the prewar years toward a purer geometric language. Kandinsky produced Semicircle during his Bauhaus period, when his predilection for geometric forms had fully asserted itself.
The circles, semicircles, triangles, rectangles, checkerboards, and squares that populate Semicircle are all arranged according to strict color and compositional harmonies carefully worked out by the artist. Floating in a sea of liquid orange, his forms defy the traditional relationship in painting between figure and ground. For Kandinsky, the circle had symbolic and cosmic meaning: The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions, he wrote in 1929. "I love the circle today as I formerly loved the horse." Significantly, Kandinsky's drawings, which were often preliminary studies for paintings, achieved an independent status during this period, perhaps to a greater degree than before or after.
