Yellow-Red-Blue

The subtractive test, taken on the large structure first and the small forms second. The large structure resists. Take away the blue disc and the right half has no weight to answer the yellow plane; the opposition the title names collapses into a picture heavy at the left. Take away the yellow plane and the disc floats with nothing to face; take away the red, set between and across them, and the halves no longer meet. The black serpentine line binds the lower field and carries the eye across the division. Those four are required, and the breadth is compelled by the opposition. What yields is the inventory of small forms, distributed for balance: several could move or go without the canvas knowing less.

Score: 7.9 / 10

What can be stated, and holds? First, that colours and forms are forces with direction and weight, not names for things: a yellow that is angular and advances can stand against a blue that is round and recedes, and the two can be held in one field as a tension rather than resolved into a picture. Second, with the configuration at the left that is often read as a face, that a human presence and a cosmic form can stand as equals in one order of colour and line. Both are visible to a viewer who has read nothing. What holds the axis is that they are the painter’s doctrine, stated in 1911 and taught at the Bauhaus: the canvas demonstrates more than it uncovers, and much of what it gives is a state.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Elevation is present and of two kinds, which is the painting’s design. The dark disc in its graded halo has a cold grandeur, a round body that seems to hang in light, the nearest the canvas comes to the cosmic. The yellow half has the opposite lift, a bright sharpness that advances. Their meeting across about two metres gives a real moment of transport at first sight. What holds the axis is height and frequency. Away from the disc the field is busy rather than elevated: the small forms are lively and exact, and the eye moves among them with interest, not awe. There is no terror and no scale beyond the body’s reach. One summit, a second of lesser height, and a lively middle between them.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The circle as cosmos and as the meeting of opposites is central to Kandinsky’s thought in these years, and here it is the right half’s whole weight. Against it the left half sets what is often read as a face in profile, so that the canvas can be read as the old confrontation of microcosm and macrocosm, a person before the heavens; that pairing is built into the two halves, which is more than allusion. But the face is never confirmed, and the reading depends on the viewer’s taking it. The circle’s cosmic meaning comes from the doctrine and not from this disc acquiring it, and the triad of primaries is a Bauhaus principle rather than a myth made particular.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The inheritance by 1925 is double: Kandinsky’s own abstraction of 1910 to 1914, free, expressive and painterly, which was his great swerve; and the geometric abstraction that followed the war, Suprematism, Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, which he had met in Moscow and saw around him at the Bauhaus. The departure is a synthesis. Ruled lines, hard planes and a clean disc share one field with a near-figurative presence and a free serpentine line, the constructed with the felt: a real position, apart from Mondrian’s exclusion of the curve and Malevich’s exclusion of everything. The stake is smaller than the turn. The geometric manner was his by the time of Composition VIII in 1923, and this canvas extends a position already taken: a swerve within his own road.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The division into two halves is the knowledge: the canvas knows opposition only because it is built as two masses facing each other across a field, with red between. The fit of colour to form is the knowledge: a yellow that is upright and angular, a blue that is round and soft at the edge, so that colour and shape say the same thing and the painting is the proof of the theory rather than its illustration. The edge is knowledge too: hard lines at the left, a graded halo at the right. The horizontal format sets the halves side by side. Held below the top because the small forms are carried by the form rather than required by it, and part of what it knows the theory knew already in words.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence over promise: a century, decades of it in a national collection, with a steady literature and constant use in teaching. The questions stay open. Is the left half a face, and if so whose, and why? Does the canvas illustrate the Bauhaus correspondences of colour and form, or test them, since its yellow is not plainly the triangle that the questionnaire of 1923 paired it with? Is the opposition resolved, or only held? How does the cosmic reading sit with the plain delight in pattern? The canvas yields at a distance as two masses and close up as a field of small events. Held below the top because much of the return goes to the doctrine and the period rather than to this canvas, and the small forms, once read, do not keep giving.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Field: abstract painting in Europe in the middle of the 1920s, the Bauhaus above all. The intrinsic force is a synthesis of geometric and lyrical abstraction at large scale, with colour, form and edge set to work as one argument; it is not a reorganisation of possibility, since abstraction itself, and Kandinsky’s share in founding it, came a dozen years before. The discount is heavy. The painter’s reach belongs to the canvases of 1910 to 1913 and, for these years, to his teaching and his book of 1926, which shaped the basic course at the Bauhaus and the design teaching after it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image, among the most reproduced abstract paintings of its century and a standard example of colour theory in schools; but presence is not redirection, and no line of painting can be shown to run from this canvas rather than from the period, the teaching or the earlier work.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Survival over 101 years, weighed in order. Form: one canvas, whole, with no later hand known on it, in the span of seventy years to two centuries whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Presence: the canvas stayed with the painter, through his leaving Germany in 1933, and then with his widow, Nina Kandinsky, so that it stood outside the German museums from which modern pictures were confiscated. For decades it was a private picture, shown at times; since it entered the national collection in Paris it has been continuously present and very widely reproduced. The private years are a small charge, taken by withholding the upper figure, and fame lifts it only a little. Fabric: its condition is not established here and is charged no more than the general risk. Nothing on the surface has dated. Set at the foot of the usual figure.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at the main joints. Colour: three primaries carried at full force across about two metres without either half overpowering the other, the yellow light enough to advance, the blue dark enough to hold its weight, the red placed to bind. Edge: two kinds commanded in one canvas, ruled black lines and sharp planes against the graded halo of the disc, laid as a soft transition without muddying the blue. Ground: a pale field that cools across the canvas, so that the halves sit in different light. Line: the serpentine drawn with a freedom the ruled lines lack. The costs: the small forms are clean but diagrammatic, with a draughtsman’s evenness that reads in places as illustration, and the touch is uniform where the large structure asks for variety.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the configuration in the angular yellow plane at the left and the dark disc in its soft halo at the right. They obey one law: every element is a force of colour and form, with weight and direction, set against an opposite in a field of balanced tension. The near-figure is drawn in the same ruled lines as the abstract forms and brings in no second physics; the disc is the same law at its largest. The range is wider than in the strict geometric abstraction of the decade: straight and curved, hard and soft edge, near-figure and pure form, warm and cool, all under one law, and the law is the painting’s subject. What holds the axis is the small vocabulary, which obeys the law but at times sits on it as an inventory; the chequered patch reads as a sample rather than a force.

Score: 8.2 / 10

An abstract canvas holds few orders, and this one holds four. The cosmic, in the disc and the painter’s doctrine of the circle; the human, in the presence at the left, if it is taken; consciousness, as the field of perception and of inner response to colour that the painting is built to act on; and music, by analogy, the opposition and resolution of forces that the painter’s theory compared to harmony, present as doctrine more than made visible. The first three are integrated, one opposition seen as person and cosmos and as the eye’s own response; the fourth is attached. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no story. The Bauhaus and the Germany of 1925 stand outside the frame. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.3 / 10