Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Paul Klee are among the most famous painters associated with the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), the pathbreaking circle of artists who worked in and around Munich in the early 20th century. Their bold experiments with color and form revolutionized modern painting.
But a sweeping retrospective at Tate Modern aims to present a more holistic picture of the group, which was established in 1911, as an international and eclectic network of artists. The show also amplifies the contributions of the female artists in the circle, some of whom have historically been sidelined.
“Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider,” curated by Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton, is the first major British survey of the group in more than 60 years. The exhibition, which has been on view since April, was packed with visitors on a recent Monday afternoon. It runs through Oct. 20, meaning that visitors to Frieze London still have time to catch this revealing show.
The title of the exhibition puts the German painter Gabriele Münter on equal footing with Kandinsky, who was her teacher and romantic partner. Münter, one of the founders of the Blue Rider, is arguably the star of Tate Modern’s exhibition, which features 51 of her works, including a generous selection of her remarkable photographs of turn-of-the-century America and Tunisia. Visitors also can see portraits in oil of her friends and fellow artists, including Kandinsky, Alexej Jawlensky, Erma Bossi and Marianne von Werefkin, a Russian painter who is represented in the show by 14 works.
Münter’s 1909 portrait of Werefkin against a yellow-gold background wearing a long plum-colored scarf and a wide-brimmed hat laden with flowers, is one of the exhibition’s highlights. The painting hails from the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich. That institution, which houses the world’s largest collection of Blue Rider art, is the main lender to Tate Modern’s exhibition, which includes over 130 paintings, drawings, photographs and objects.
The Lenbachhaus’s Blue Rider trove largely exists thanks to Münter; in 1957, when she turned 80, she donated more than 1,000 works by herself and other key figures in the group to the museum.
Melanie Vietmeier, who oversees the Blue Rider collection at the Lenbachhaus, sees the London exhibition as an opportunity to dispel popular misconceptions about the group, including its association with abstract art.
“I think figuration is more important for the Blue Rider than abstraction,” she said in a recent interview at the Lenbachhaus. “It’s Kandinsky, sure, and Franz Marc in his late works, but that’s it. All the other artists were sticking to figuration all throughout their life,” she added.
A pair of exhibitions held in 1911 and 1912 and the single issue of the “Blue Rider Almanac,” edited by Kandinsky and Marc and published in 1912, constituted the group’s public undertakings. Yet the Blue Rider’s influence radiated beyond these activities, both through the work that its adherents produced and its philosophical approach to art. “The whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity,” Kandinsky and Marc proclaimed.
Munich in the years before the First World War was an ideal base for an artistic undertaking with such explicitly pluralistic aims. According to Vietmeier, the atmosphere in the Bavarian capital helped make the Blue Rider less male-dominated and more international than other artistic circles of the period, including the expressionist group Die Brücke. She pointed to Munich “as a center also for education for female artists” and as “a place where many artists came from abroad.” “It was a transnational project,” she said.
Tate Modern’s exhibition stresses that the Blue Rider was an international collective. Along with the German and Russian artists most associated with the movement, the show includes works by the Italian painter Bossi (including a grandly elegant portrait of Werefkin), the French artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay and the avant-garde Ukrainian painter Wladimir Burljuk.
At the same time, the exhibition underscores how the Blue Rider artists sought to eviscerate differences between mediums in much the same way as it had little patience for national borders. A room dedicated to Kandinsky’s investigations into music and sound explores the painter’s creative reactions to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, whose discordant strains waft through the small gallery where Kandinsky’s “Impression III (Concert)” (1911) hangs. In a letter to the composer, he wrote that Schoenberg’s atonal compositions contained “precisely what I have been looking for in pictorial form.” The following year, Schoenberg contributed an essay to the “Blue Rider Almanac.”
In an email, Sidlina, the exhibition’s lead curator, acknowledged “the impossibility of comprehensively summing up the Blue Rider project in a single exhibition.” In assembling the show, she said that her team was guided by key questions including, “Who are the people behind the Blue Rider creative project, and how did each of their individual biographical trajectories contribute to the common task?”
Vietmeier is pleased that Tate Modern has taken a multifaceted approach to the group with their carefully assembled and handsomely mounted exhibition. What distinguished the Blue Rider artists, she said, were “all the ideas that grew during that time, and the exchanges and this search for a new art, for new ways of expression, of going against conventions.”
“They have this plurality,” she continued, arguing that it would be a mistake to try to pigeonhole the Blue Rider artists as representatives of any single style. To Kandinsky, the creative drive was a spiritual impulse. “Everything is possible, as it only has to be made of inner necessity, and this can take any form,” she said, referring to the artist’s theories.
In placing an emphasis on what Vietmeier calls the Blue Rider’s “interdisciplinarity and openness,” including forays into music and performance (a section is dedicated to the dancer Alexander Sacharoff, a favorite subject of Werefkin), the London exhibition reveals an uncommonly full spectrum of the group’s achievements.
“I think it’s a good way of looking at the Blue Rider,” she said.
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