Yellow Center

In 1926 the Bauhaus was settling into its new building in Dessau, after the school had been squeezed out of Weimar, and Kandinsky, one of its masters, published a book that year called Point and Line to Plane. It sets out, almost like a grammar, how points, lines and circles behave on a flat surface. Yellow Center comes from the same year. A heavy black ring closes around a patch of yellow, thin bars and small triangles cut across it, and soft, cloudy spots of blue, red and pink drift around the edges. It is a small canvas, about 45 centimetres high, and Kandinsky marked it with his monogram and the year 26 in the lower left corner. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam bought it in 1964, and today it is kept in the museum's Depot, the storage building in Rotterdam that visitors can walk through.