Kleine Welten I, from Kleine Welten

As the cultural policy in Russia after the revolution shifted from promoting the avant-garde to social realism, Wassily Kandinsky left Moscow, where he had spent the years of war and revolution since 1914, and returned to Germany in December 1921. It was there, where he had lived during his formative years as a young artist since 1896, that he hoped to find a future for himself and his wife Nina. The move paid off: in 1922 the founder and director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius (1883-1969), offered him the position of teacher for wall painting. Kandinsky joined the small but illustrious staff of the school, which included Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Paul Klee, amongst others, each of whom was a 'master' of a specific workshop or class. That same year Kandinsky received a commission by the Propyläen Verlag in Berlin for a print portfolio and he created Kleine Welten, a set of 12 prints in a variety of techniques. It was to become the first major series of purely abstract works in the print medium and arguably the most important portfolio created at the Bauhaus.