Kleine Welten V (Small Worlds V)

Vasily Kandinsky

Woodcut printed in red, blue, yellow, and black

Museum of Modern Art

Kleine Welten V (Small Worlds V) is a color woodcut printed in red, blue, yellow, and black, created by Vasily Kandinsky in 1922 as part of the twelve-print portfolio Kleine Welten. The composition is fully abstract, deploying a dynamic interplay of geometric forms, energetic calligraphic lines, and textural dot-work characteristic of Kandinsky's Bauhaus-era vocabulary, with dots made by incising the woodblock conveying what MoMA describes as "violent energy." Kandinsky—born in Moscow in 1866, a co-founder of the Blue Rider group in 1911, and a pioneering theorist of pure abstraction—created the portfolio shortly after joining the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar. Each print in the series was conceived as an autonomous microcosm, with meaning generated entirely through the interplay of line, plane, color, and the inherent material properties of the chosen printmaking medium.