Der Blaue Reiter translates as ‘The Blue Rider’, and is a sub-movement of German Expressionism. Founded in Munich in 1909 by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the first official Der Blaue Reiter exhibition was held in December 1911. The movement takes its name from an early Kandinsky painting.
Many other artists were involved in the Der Blaue Reiter movement including Paul Klee, August Macke, Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin. In order to keep this post short and sweet, I will be focussing on Kandinsky who was the movement’s greatest influence.
Kandinsky published a pseudo-manifesto for Der Blaue Reiter in 1912 called ‘Der Blaue Reiter Almanac’. The striking cover is a watercolour and Indian ink and pencil on paper by Kandinsky himself, which is a visual manifestation of the key concepts of the movement. These were as follows: the promotion of modern art, the relationship between art and music, the spirituality and symbolism of colour, and painting in a spontaneous and intuitive manner.
The whole point of Der Blaue Reiter was to pursue the spiritual meaning of art, using abstraction to express avant-garde ideas – that is, that colours and forms have unique spiritual meanings. Abstraction came about by separating colours and forms, and can be seen clearly in paintings such as ‘Lyrisches’, 1911 and ‘Blue Horse I’, 1911.
Der Blaue Reiter artworks often have titles linking art and music, such as ‘composition’ or ‘etude’ – the artists drew parallels between the inability of music to take up physical space in the world, and the spirituality of art. These themes paved the way for later, well-known movements including Cubism and Fauvism (think: George Braque’s ‘Pitcher with Violin’). The name of the movement summarizes some of its most important points: the colour blue was considered the most spiritual colour, and the rider was meant to signify the ability to move ‘beyond’, spiritually.
Wassily Kandinsky
Almost everyone has heard of Kandinsky. Lots of people could probably point out a Kandinsky painting, too. His ‘composition’ paintings are extremely recognisable, comprising basic shapes, sharp lines, primary colours, and to the close observer, musical influences. But not many people know about Kandinsky, his painting, and how his influence on Der Blaue Reiter would go on to change the course of abstract Modernism.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, Russia in 1886, and aged thirty, he moved to Munich to study painting. His early painting entitled ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ is somewhat unimpressive, and the style and subject matter are little-related to the later movement: it is extremely flat, the colours are over-combined, and it demonstrates his trying (and in my opinion, failing) to fit in with the popular Post-Impressionist style of the time. Nonetheless, the artist quickly found his feet and embarked on a movement that would change the course of abstraction.
His Der Blaue Reiter paintings can be summarised by works such as ‘Romantic Landscape’, which uses a rainbow of colours and expressive brush strokes to embody the spiritual meaning of colour and form. The composition appears random and spontaneous, highlighting the Der Blaue Reiter belief that painting should be executed intuitively.
After the movement came to an end following the deaths of Franz Marc and Paul Klee in WWI, Kandinsky’s style evolved into his more refined ‘compositions’, which sustained many of the founding principles of Der Blaue Reiter.
