Yellow, Red, Blue
Vassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944) · 1925
Not currently on display. The Centre Pompidou building is closed for renovation from September 2025 until about 2030, so this work is not on view in Paris; check the museum website for where the collection is being shown. The museum's record noted it at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome from September 2026 to February 2027.
Two worlds face each other across a wide canvas. On the left, a pale yellow rectangle, straight lines, a grid of small squares and a profile like a face, drawn with the clarity of a diagram. On the right, a heavy blue circle, a wavy black arc, purple and red shapes that swell and curl like smoke. Between them a jagged black line snakes down the middle as if to keep the two halves apart. The title names the three primary colours, and the painting is an essay in what each of them does to the eye and the mind.
Kandinsky painted it in Weimar in 1925 while teaching at the Bauhaus, and it puts his theories into practice. He believed that yellow was warm and moved toward the viewer, that blue was cold and receded, that red stood firm in the middle, and that straight lines and sharp angles belonged with yellow while curves belonged with blue. Look at how the left side is light, geometric and airy, and the right side dark, organic and dense, and how your gaze keeps travelling between them. He wanted painting to work like music, and he wrote about colours as sounds; the left is a bright flute, the right a cello.
The canvas is one of the treasures of the Kandinsky bequest. His widow Nina gave it to the French state in 1976, along with a large group of works, and it became a centrepiece of the museum when the Centre Pompidou opened the following year. It is often lent to exhibitions, and while the Paris building is closed it is among the most travelled works of the collection. If you find it on a museum wall elsewhere, stand back first to feel the two halves push against each other, then come close to see how thinly and precisely it is painted.
Did You Know? Kandinsky claimed to hear colours and see sounds, a condition called synaesthesia, and said that the sound of a trumpet was the colour yellow.
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