A Closer Look at Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow – Red – Blue
By Laura Heyrman
“Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.” – Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian-French, 1866-1944), painter and art theorist, was one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Though he came to his artistic career relatively late, having studied and taught law until he was 30, the artist quickly absorbed traditional European artistic ideas as well as late 19th century innovations. Within ten years of embarking on his artistic career, Kandinsky was developing avant-garde theories of abstraction, reflected in his paintings and published in 1911 as Concerning the Spiritual in Art. (For additional information on Kandinsky’s theories and art, see Chance Encounters 24: Kandinsky and the Birth of Abstraction irequireart.substack.com/p/chance-encounters-edition-24)
A few years after joining the Bauhaus art school as a professor, Kandinsky painted Yellow – Red – Blue (Gelb – Rot – Blau, 1925), which is considered by many to be a demonstration of concepts the artist explained in his second book Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926. This painting’s emphasis on geometric forms places it in the category that Kandinsky termed “Compositions.” Early in his career, the artist had divided his works into three categories – “Impressions” which originated with real-world inspirations and maintained representational forms, “Improvisations” which are painterly, expressive, non-representational works, and "Compositions," structured, geometric pure abstractions which became Kandinsky’s preferred approach during the Bauhaus years (1922-1933) and after.
When confronted by an abstract or non-representational painting, Kandinsky would recommend exploring the forms and colors without prejudice or inhibition. That can be sufficient, but like all art, one’s appreciation deepens as one explores the work. The slide show below focuses on the artist’s visual language and compositional strategies. Let me point out some of the work’s details before you explore the images I’ve chosen.
On examining the work as a whole, one notices the three title colors laid out from left to right, appearing almost as well-defined characters against a background of painterly clouds of color. Focusing on the three “characters,” contrasting shapes are recognizable, rectangles at the heart of the yellow section, an irregular, tilted cross of red tones, and a blue circle. The yellow section suggests a human head to many viewers, though this may be an instance of our mental habit of seeing faces in practical objects and nature (pareidolia).
The isolation of the yellow figure contrasts with the entangled red and blue sections. One the right, the blue circle is overlapped by geometric and organic shapes in which areas of color seem to pulse and blend as they intersect with one another. This results in an area of purplish tones laid over the red cross. The whole effect is of a battle of shapes and colors, creating another contrast with the yellow section which seems more calm with fewer layered shapes.
Many of Kandinsky’s favorite motifs appear in this painting. The colorful clouds of the background began to appear in works of the 1910s and continued throughout the rest of the artist’s career. Another form that appears frequently in Kandinsky’s paintings of all periods is the checkerboard pattern; here there are three – one black and white, two multicolored. The angled positions of these patterned shapes makes them appear to be floating in a three-dimensional space, in contrast to the many flat or two-dimensional shapes and patterns in the rest of the painting. Examples of these flat-looking elements are the sets of parallel lines in the upper left, at the base of the yellow “head,” and in the lower right. The distribution of these line sets creates echoes across the canvas, something that the artist also does with colors and shapes.
Four sharply defined circles surrounded by borders of painterly color are dotted across the composition. For Kandinsky, the circle symbolized peace and the human soul, and during the 1920s, the artist created many paintings dominated by circular forms. In spite of the variety of shapes in this painting, these four circles make themselves noticeable by their isolation. Overlapping the large, deep blue circle are two other small circles which demonstrate an important characteristic of this painting. Nearly every time a shape is bisected by another’s contour line, its color changes. This is especially noticeable in two small circles of the blue section and the many shapes of the red section, but it also appears in the yellow side of the painting. Even the parallel orange curves in the upper left corner are paler after they cross the black diagonal line.
One last contrast Kandinsky applied in this painting is hard to see in reproduction; that is the paint surfaces. In the background, the artist’s application of paint looks almost like watercolor; it is painterly but thin. The small circles: white, black and grey, are densely covered with smooth, solid color, as is the red triangle in the upper left. Many of the layered shapes between the blue circle and red cross have small patches of impasto (thick paint). Finally, some of the black forms: the large snaking line on the right, the thick diagonal line that cuts through the red cross, and the intersecting curves and spikes in the lower right, are painted with a shinier finish than the rest of the painting, making them seem like bold invaders in Kandinsky’s colorful composition.
“Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?” – Wassily Kandinsky
I will leave you to explore Kandinsky’s painted world of color, shape, and texture now. What do you notice in this painting? Please share your thoughts and any questions on Substack at this link: irequireart.substack.com/p/viewing-room-36/comments
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