Oskar Fischinger made experimental abstract films independently in Germany before being recruited to Hollywood by Paramount Pictures in 1936. His 1933 Kreise (Circles) had been the first color-on-film movie in Europe, and he later employed his innovative animation techniques at MGM, Disney (where he worked on Fantasia), and Orson Welles’s Mercury Studios. In the 1940s, Fischinger screened his films at the Nierendorf Gallery, in New York, where Katherine Dreier obtained this gouache. Dreier may have recognized a formal link to Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1925–26)—for which he had filmed early versions of his spinning Rotoreliefs—in the abstract patterns formed by circles in motion in Fischinger’s animated films.