Pointed and Round

In 1923 Kandinsky handed round a questionnaire at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he ran the wall-painting workshop. It showed three outlines, a triangle, a square and a circle, and asked colleagues and students to fill each one with yellow, red or blue. He was hoping to find a rule that held for everyone. His own answer was a yellow triangle, a red square and a blue circle, while two fellow teachers, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, matched them differently. In February 1925 he painted this on board and called it Spitz und Rund, pointed and round. The small yellow triangle at the lower right follows his rule. The big disc at the top is a dusty red instead, set on a ground of blue, and between the two a dark wedge drives down towards the lower left. The picture entered the Guggenheim collection in 1937, among the works Solomon Guggenheim gave to the foundation he set up that year.