Jaune Rouge Bleu

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Centre Pompidou

Painted in 1925 during Kandinsky's tenure at the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau) is a monumental oil on canvas measuring 128 × 201.5 cm that exemplifies his mature geometric abstraction. The composition is structured around the three primary colors—yellow dominating the left in luminous, geometrically precise forms, blue anchoring the right in darker, more freely rendered shapes, and red mediating between them at the center—articulated through an interplay of circles, triangles, rectangles, and sinuous black lines. Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter and pioneering theorist, believed that color and form operated as direct equivalents of musical sound and psychological experience, a philosophy he codified in his landmark writings. Widely cited as one of his most accomplished Bauhaus-period works, the painting synthesizes his theoretical program—most fully elaborated in Point and Line to Plane (1926)—with a commanding pictorial presence that remains a cornerstone of early twentieth-century abstract art.