The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 5.60 cm each side, 3.45 cm above, 3.96 cm below.
- 100 × 70 cm sheet
- A 100 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 40 × 28 in. Margins 9.12 cm each side, 5.01 cm above, 5.77 cm below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 58.20 × 42.00 cm for the small sheet, 81.15 × 58.62 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889–1943), Bewegtes Kreisbild (Animated Circle Picture; French Cercles mouvementés), 1934
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 100 cm. No. 1934/1 in Hugo Weber's catalogue of her works (1948)
- Held by
- Kunstmuseum Basel, gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach
- Inventory
- G 1968.106
- Rights
- Marked by the museum as public-domain image data («Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel»). The painting itself is free in Switzerland, the EU and the UK; in the United States we treat it as still protected – see below
- File
- Kunstmuseum Basel, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The paint runs to all four borders of the museum's file; we print the file whole.
- Source
- Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Bewegtes Kreisbild, in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Sammlung Online, sammlung.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/de/collection/item/1892, accessed 3 October 2026
The picture Taeuber-Arp made
An off-white ground, and on it seventeen circles of one and the same size: six grey, three black, three dark blue, five light blue. Eleven of them gather in a loose block in the upper middle, in rows and columns that never quite complete, some of them just touching. The rest have drifted away: two grey circles at the left edge, one grey at the right, two light blue ones and a grey near the bottom, far apart. Nothing else – no line, no second shape, no frame.
According to Max Bill, Taeuber-Arp herself called it a «Päng-Bild», a bang picture. In his essay on her, written in the year of her death, Bill described the first impression as a cheerful hovering – the balls of a juggler, the dice of a gambler – and then the order underneath: groups that move together like a chorus, and the clear space in which it all happens. He analysed the arrangement in a series of diagrams.
The dynamic compositions
In the 1930s Taeuber-Arp, by then living outside Paris with Hans Arp, painted a group of works that her cataloguer Hugo Weber called «compositions dynamiques à cercles, barres, rectangles et carrés»: abstract pictures in which circles are the main motif and the arrangement suggests movement. Bewegtes Kreisbild is the first entry for 1934 in Weber's catalogue.
It was shown at Kunsthalle Basel in Konstruktivisten in 1937 and in Konkrete Kunst in 1944, and travelled to London in 1959 and to the retrospective at Kunstmuseum Basel, Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art in 2021–22. It came to the Kunstmuseum Basel as a gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, Hans Arp's second wife.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.82×
The museum catalogues the canvas at 72.5 × 100 cm and serves a file of 9,656 × 6,995 px. Anchored on the catalogued width, as everywhere in this catalogue, that is 96.56 px/cm, or 245 dpi if the picture were printed at original size – below our floor of 300 dpi, so there is no 1:1 sheet.
At exactly 300 dpi the file carries 81.75 cm of image width, 0.82× the original. That is what the 100 × 70 cm sheet prints, one pixel of the museum's file to one pixel of the print, with no scaling at all. The 70 × 50 cm sheet prints it 58.80 cm wide – 0.59× original, with 417 dpi available.
The file's ratio is 1.3804, the catalogued dimensions give 1.3793 – 0.08 % apart. Anchored on the width, the printed height corresponds to 72.44 cm of canvas instead of 72.5. Well within what a stretched canvas varies by; the file is not stretched.
What we measured at the edges
Before printing a museum file whole we check that it really is the picture and not the picture plus a photographer's backdrop. Forty samples along each border, at the outermost pixel row and eight pixels in, give luminance medians of 215 and 214 at the top, 234 and 229 at the bottom, 219 and 221 on the left and 217 and 219 on the right, every sample the same faintly warm white as the painted ground. At full resolution the four corners show brushwork and fine cracks in the paint running off the edge of the file. Nothing is cut away.
What we are allowed to sell
Sophie Taeuber-Arp died on 13 January 1943, so the painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1 January 2014.
The United States is different. For a foreign work first published after 1930, US copyright can run for 95 years from publication, and copyright in works still protected in their home country in 1996 was restored by US law. Bewegtes Kreisbild was listed in an exhibition catalogue in 1937 and discussed in print in 1943; depending on which printing counts as first publication, it may be protected in the US until the end of 2032 or 2038. We cannot rule that out, so we do not sell this sheet into the United States: it is not shipped to US addresses and not offered on Amazon in the US.
At the reproduction level the Kunstmuseum Basel marks this object as public-domain image data and allows it to be shared, used for any purpose – commercial included – and edited, without asking. The painting is a flat work, so in none of our markets does a separate right arise in the photograph. The museum asks that the artist, title and source be named with a link, and that its logo never be used; both are done above. The museum is our source, not our partner. Markets checked: Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom – clear. United States – not clear, not sold.
A note on colour, and one on choosing
Measured from the museum file, downsampled to 240 × 174 px: only 34.3 % of the pixels carry colour at the lowest threshold, and within that blue accounts for 50.8 %, warm tones 48.9 % – the faint warmth of the white ground. From a threshold of 0.15 up only the circles count, and they are 100 % blue. Blue holds the majority at every threshold, if narrowly at the first: filed under Paintings and Blue.
Which size: the small sheet suits a desk wall or a narrow hall, where the circles read as a pattern. The large one gives them room to float, over a sofa or a long sideboard.