Yellow-Red-Blue

By 1925 Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus, the German school where painting, architecture and craft were meant to be worked out like a shared grammar. This canvas reads as his lesson made visible. On the left a bright yellow rectangle and clean straight lines. On the right a heavy dark blue circle and looser, curving forms. He had spent 20 years arguing that colours and shapes carry feeling on their own, a yellow that presses forward, a blue that pulls inward, a circle he thought of as calm and whole. The two halves push against each other across the middle, and a leaning red cross holds the join between them.