Circles
Oil on canvas board
28 x 22 inches
Circa 1927–1948
Will Henry Stevens was an influential teacher at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. He painted mountain scenery and non-representational compositions. The latter have much in common with Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstractionist who wrote about the spiritual dimensions of art. When a selection of Stevens’s work was exhibited at Black Mountain College, a groundbreaking modernist art collective in North Carolina, founding-figure Josef Albers praised their “sensitive musicality.”
The aptly titled Circles resonates with sound as the rings float from the bottom up, progressing from a lighter background to a darker one. Solid small dots are sprinkled across the surface, while transparent circles interlace with one another.
Other works by this artist