Circulism (الدائرية - سيركلزم) is an art style and an art theory founded by the Kuwaiti artist Khalifa Qattan (خليفة القطان - Khalefa Alqattan) (1934-2003) during the early 1960s. While the general idea many of today's westerners have about Kuwaiti art or art from the Middle East being mostly decorative in the fields of architecture, pottery, textile or other applied non-modern or non-western arts, there was as a matter of fact an art movement in the Middle East which followed the western approach from as early as the late nineteenth-century. In Kuwait the knowledge of basic western art principles started during early 1940s when Egyptian teachers taught the Kuwaiti pupils some of basic painting and printing techniques in the Mubarakiyah School.