The Blue Rider
In 1911, while working on the Blue Rider Almanac, Kandinsky, together with a group of young avant-garde artists, established an international association bearing the same name in Munich and Murnau. Franz Marc was one of the originators of the association, along with Kandinsky. The name came up during a conversation over coffee: they both loved the color blue in paintings, Marc liked horses, and Kandinsky was fond of riders.
The group comprised August Macke, Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paul Klee. The Burliuk brothers, Gabriele Münter, and Robert Delaunay, as well as a number of dancers and composers, also participated in the Blue Rider's activities. The group took an active part in the movement for the renewal of German art in the early 20th century. In this respect, they were consistent with Die Brücke (another artistic association established in Berlin and Dresden several years earlier). The Blue Rider became a truly international community. Russians, Germans, and Frenchmen were all united in their desire to create new art independent of existing rules and canons, and to withdraw from "the modernist programme of modern art which is externally oriented." While representatives of Die Brücke gravitated toward figurative Expressionism, many participants of the Blue Rider tended toward abstract compositions, setting color-related, pictorial, and ornamental problems and seeking associative solutions.
The first exhibition of the association was held on December 18, 1911, at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich. The paintings of different members of the group forming the exposition were very close to each other. The exhibited Running Horse by Campendonk was most likely inspired by Franz Marc's creative work (particularly by the Large Blue Horses), Macke's Storm took over from Kandinsky's tradition, while Kandinsky, in his turn, presented his color experiments Composition V and Improvisation 22 to be judged by art lovers.
In March 1912, the second exposition was held at the H. Goltz Gallery. Other groups of artists also took part in it, including Die Brücke, Suprematists, and Cubists. In May of the same year, the Blue Rider published an almanac (and distributed it during the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne) where participants provided their reflections on the history and development of painting. Articles were accompanied by illustrations showing the commonality of ancient art in different parts of the world. The authors paid great attention to children's drawing, regarding it as rightful painting — which was a rather revolutionary idea. The association also adhered to its principle of the synthesis of the arts: several columns were dedicated to music.
Kandinsky's work Concerning the Spiritual in Art, where considerable attention was paid to the aesthetics of form and color as well as the psychological role of hues, became the quintessence of the Blue Rider's trends in art. During this period, figuration gradually vanished from his works (as in With the Black Arc), and he created colorful paintings that looked like photographic phenomena embodied in paint.
The second (and the last) almanac was published by the Blue Rider in 1914. A year earlier, the last major exposition of the association took place in the spaces provided by the Der Sturm magazine in Berlin. When World War I began, Kandinsky left Germany, and that was the end of the Blue Rider period in his biography. When its leaders broke up, the group itself ceased to exist. In the 1920s, after the Revolution in Russia, Kandinsky returned to Germany, joined the Bauhaus School, and met some of his old companions from the Blue Rider (including Klee). However, the association was never revived in its original state.
SEE the Almanac
