Powerful Red

While teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar (from 1922), Kandinsky was more and more occupied by constructive and rational elements in art and its communication. In the year he painted Powerful Red (1928) Wassily Kandinsky gave a course on abstraction as part of an artistic foundation course at the Bauhaus. The following questions were to be dealt with: "Isolated color, color systems, interrelations ..." (as part of the color course), "Isolated forms, form systems, interrelations ..." (as part of the form course). The conclusion was an examination of the "relation of color and form, its shift in tension and effect". Powerful Red can be described as a textbook example for the questions Kandinsky presented to his students. It presents the effect of red in various combinations of forms and colors, joining them in a dynamic composition.