Kandinsky's Color-Form Correspondence and the Bauhaus Colors: An Empirical View

The use of primary colors and forms in the fine arts and design at the Bauhaus was a revolutionary innovation of the early 20th century. There was a desire to find a universal, ideal visual language, a quest to establish basic principles of general applicability. To this end, color and form were reduced to their fundamentals. In his theorizing and teaching, Wassily Kandinsky was especially interested in the relationship of color and form. To him, there was an inherent link between the two [1], suggesting a general correspondence of color and form [2]. He developed the following color-form assignments: yellow triangle, red square and blue circle. These combinations became widely used at the Bauhaus when Kandinsky joined it in 1922 [3], being much in evidence in his teaching, and were a repetitive theme throughout the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923.

There are a number of reports that Kandinsky used an empirical approach to investigate his correspondence hypothesis in 1923 [4]. He designed a questionnaire that instructed participants to assign yellow, red and blue to the triangle, square and circle and to give a rationale for their choice (Fig. 2). Reports differ with regard to the reliability of the empirical basis of the results of this survey taken to support the correspondence hypothesis [5].

In a subsequent elaboration of his correspondence theory, Kandinsky argued that the fundamental correspondence of basic colors and forms was informed by the inherent relationships of colors and angles [6]. While his model was absolute and universal in theory, he did not make it predominant in his theorizing, and he did not preclude that artistic practice, including his own, might differ from it. There were also fellow artists at the Bauhaus who contested his view [7].

Fig. 2.

Original questionnaire of the wallpainting workshop, designed by Kandinsky at the Bauhaus to investigate the correspondence of basic colors and forms, 1923. Filled in using the Kandinsky color-form assignment by an unknown member of the Bauhaus.

© Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin, Germany

Promoted by others than Kandinsky himself, these specific color-form combinations thereafter became a famous icon of the Bauhaus school of design, gaining worldwide recognition and enjoying frequent use. Today, basic colors and forms can be seen in countless variations in art and design [8].

Using a variant of Kandinsky's historical questionnaire, my recent empirical study [9] demonstrated individual preferences in color-form assignments. About half of the student participants produced a red triangle, a blue square and a yellow circle. The rationales for this choice frequently stated world-knowledge associations: The red triangle resembles a traffic or other warning sign, and the yellow circle resembles the sun. Half the participants preferred one of the remaining five choices. Kandinsky's assignments were the least preferred.

These results are best illuminated using a framework of present-day psychological aesthetics. A host of determiners, ranging from evolution to local cultural contexts, govern aesthetic processing. Individuals who have experienced a liberal upbringing allowing many determiners to have an effect are likely to develop individualized preferences in aesthetic judgment [10]. My and others' recent findings of individual differences are due to a multitude of factors: world knowledge, education, historical change, and societal, group-specific and individual leitmotifs. Thus, a hypothesis of fundamental color-form correspondence appears primarily idiosyncratic in retrospect. The prominence of the Bauhaus colors is owed to a historical development.