Yellow-Red-Blue

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Centre Pompidou

Painted in 1925 during Kandinsky's tenure at the Bauhaus school in Germany, Yellow-Red-Blue is one of his most celebrated large-scale abstract works. The composition is structured around the three primary colors and three fundamental geometric forms — triangle, circle, and square — arranged across a canvas that divides loosely into two contrasting halves: a brighter, more ordered left side dominated by yellows and golds, and a darker, more complex right side anchored by a large blue circle. Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter widely regarded as a pioneer of abstract art, brought to this work his deeply developed theories on the emotional and spiritual resonance of color and form, drawn from his landmark 1911 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The painting stands as a synthesis of his Bauhaus-era geometric rigor and his enduring belief that visual art could function analogously to music, evoking feeling without recourse to representation.