Circles of Washington Square is the largest painting in Bluemner's oeuvre and was created in January 1935 in the midtown studio of his friend and patron Katherine Hochfield. The following month it was on view around the corner from the park at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in its Abstract Painting in America exhibition, the very first museum showing of American abstract art. Bluemner authority Jeffrey Russell Hayes has conjectured that this extremely rare treatment by the artist of an urban subject may have been created with the Whitney "crowd" in mind (Conversation with Jeffrey Russell Hayes, August 15, 2000). This included the recently deceased Glen Coleman and such Precisionist artists as Charles Demuth. While recognizing that the artist's prismatic effects invite comparison to the work of the Precisionists, Hayes believes Bluemner's "symbolic and mystical vision bears only superficial relation to that style" ("Oscar Bluemner's Late Landscapes: 'The Musical Color of Fateful Experience," Art Journal, vol. 44, no. 4 [Winter 1984]: 358).

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, a number of painters, photographers, and print makers created images that prominently feature the skyscaper at No. 1 Fifth Avenue that appears in the background of Bluemner's canvas, and which was designed by the architectural firm of Helme & Corbett in association with Sugarman & Berge. The building was meant to give the impression of a free-standing tower rising from Washington Square Park in one continuous thrust to a crown of picturesque penthouses and chimney stacks. Its creation followed a 1916 Zoning Resolution, which provided the legislative framework for the rapid development of tall commercial and residential towers along Fifth Avenue. After World War I, lower Fifth Avenue was remade into a line of tall apartment houses, and by 1930 there were no private houses on the lower end of the avenue.

No. 1 Fifth Avenue was generally admired by architectural critics of the period, but its arrival heralded the sometimes painful architectural changes that were being wrought in the old precinct of Washington Square. Architectural critic Lewis Mumford praised the structure in The New Yorker: "There is a real kick in this super-castle, the walls of which recede in all manner of clever ways to a fascinating center tower. There are battlements, machicolations, pointed buttresses and various medieval suggestions, yet this is thoroughly modern architecture….If the old, intimate, homey atmosphere of this section must go, the smocked brethren are to be congratulated on the thrilling quality of this huge interloper. Our print shops will probably display etchings of it in short order, for it offers excellent material for the artist. Number One was designed by Helme & Corbett, who have shown once more that they are thoroughly at home in the modern idiom"("The Skyline: A Temple of Beauty Gleams and Patrician Grayness Where Fifth Avenue Meets the Park," The New Yorker 3 [October 1, 1927] 64).

No. 1 Fifth Avenue also served as the impetus for social critic Edmund Wilson's scathing article "The Crushing of Washington Square," which appeared in The New Republic: "The big red houses of the north and west sides had already been gutted of their grandeurs and crammed with economized cells, the cubbyholes of modern apartments, and the sooty peeling fronts of the south side, with their air of romance and mystery, had already been replaced by fresh arty grays and pinks…Already last spring one was finding whole blocks of familiar shops, delicatessen stores and old saloons snatched away without warning from under one, so that they seemed to be losing their shapes as well as their personalities. And now, in the short months of summer, there have been erected on lower Fifth Avenue two monstrous apartment houses—one just south of the Brevoort Hotel [No. 1 Fifth Avenue] and the other between Tenth and Eleventh Streets. They loom over the village like mountains, and they have already changed its proportions. Their effect is to crush, in the Washington Arch and in the row of red facades behind it, whatever these had formerly kept of chaste elegance and decorous pride. The whole village seems now merely a base for these cubic apartment buildings. Such good quality as still lingered here along with the low roofs of the provincial town has thus far been rendered insignificant: it is impossible to get away from these huge coarse and swollen mounds—blunt, clumsy, bleaching the sunlight with their dismal pale yellow sides and stamping down both the old formal square and the newer Bohemian refuge" (Edmund Wilson, "The Crushing of Washington Square," New Republic 52 [October 12, 1927]: 212).