The Blue Rider – Der Blaue Reiter – was the name of a group, an almanac and an artistic movement, all of them centred round the remarkable figure of Wassily Kandinsky in the years just before the First World War.
He and the Bavarian Franz Marc together edited the almanac with a Blue Rider on the cover (for Kandinsky, blue meant the spiritual and the bluer the better). But the Blaue Reiter circle as a group was much larger and quite extraordinarily diverse.
There was Gabriele Munter, who in this exhibition takes pride of place with Kandinsky at the centre of the movement; there was the American Robert Delaunay, the Croatian Erma Bossi, the Russian aristocrat Alexaj Jawlensky, the German Maria Frank Marck, wife of Franz.
Tate Modern’s “Expressionists, Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider” exhibition identifies 17 artists from a remarkably diverse range of backgrounds and nationalities, who are united in…What? you are left wondering as you explore the over 130 works, brought together in the UK for the first time in over 60 years thanks to a collaboration with the Lenbachhaus art museum in Munich.
They came together, Tate Modern tells us, to form, in their own words, “a union of various countries to serve one purpose” – to transform modern art. It’s a punchy notion, and sounds good. But was such a lofty endeavour what really untied and motivated those involved?
The movement was an offshoot of the NKVM, the Munich association of artists, and its home was Bavaria. What was striking about them was that there was no common style to unite their work; they were likeminded friends, artistic comrades, sometimes lovers, but their work was strikingly different.
Perhaps the most wonderful room in this exhibition is one with Franz Marc’s vivid animal paintings including the Tiger of the exhibition poster; a wall of Kandinsky’s most explosive abstract paintings including two takes on the Deluge; Maria Franck Marc’s Three Wise Men, a lyrical view of the Epiphany, and her Girl with Toddler, a painting demonstrating her focus on the aesthetics of the child.
It’s a riot of very different sensations for the viewer and you are forced to reflect that it’s quite the movement to bring together abstract, figurative, naïve and symbolist artists. And yet that question persists: just what was the “Expressionism” that united them?
Gabriele Munter in writing about the movement declared that it was a group of friends, interested in each others’ work and influencing each other; so, it was something more informal than a common aesthetic. The extent to which the artists influenced each other was apparent in the artistic commune some of them set up in Murnau, a little village outside Munich – one would give an awful lot to know what the villagers made of these bohemian eccentrics who could paint a cow looking like a rainbow, like Kandinsky did.
But what Munter seems to miss, and which is obvious in the works on offer – though much less in the Tate’s curatorial direction in this show – is the striking religious aspect of this disparate group of artistic souls.
This being Tate Modern, we are directed towards the transgressive gender aspects – which is certainly apparent in Marianne Werefkin’s depictions of the actor/dancer Alexander Sacharoff – and their interests in alternative spiritualities. Yet what is most striking is the prominence of Christian motifs and themes.
Indeed, it is spirituality that is a main unifying influence in the group. Kandinsky’s book, On the Spiritual in Art, certainly emphasises the role of pure colour, and of liberation from depicting mere forms, in creating authentic art.
But what was important for him was that the artist and the viewer should be spiritually committed and liberated from the materialism which could produce, say, a picture of a Crucifixion by an artist who didn’t believe in Christ.
In other words, it was spiritual authenticity that mattered rather than whether the artist produced figurative or abstract art. And Kandinsky himself was a devout Orthodox Christian, whose orthodoxy is easily apparent in his art of this period, though he was also sympathetic to Theosophy. Among his most dynamic abstract pieces were two reflections on The Deluge, along with St George and All Saints.
And he was not alone in his Christianity. Franz Marc was Bavarian but his mother was Calvinist and he had early thought of becoming a minister of religion before opting for art; in the Blue Rider almanac he writes about “Spiritual Goods”.
Gabriele Munter was a Protestant, and her Still Life with St George shows an icon of the saint, an unequivocally Catholic statue of the Virgin and Child and a little pilgrim saint.
Marianne Werefkin’s Prayer, shows a man praying before a crucifix in a Bavarian wayside shrine, in the shadow of the surrounding hills. Marianne Franck-Marc’s Three Wise Men is a soft and light-filled take on the subject, with Russian doll-like angels in the foreground and the three magi on camel, elephant and horse in the background. These are artists embedded in a Christian environment.
The same goes even for the mediums they used: the exhibition demonstrates their interest in Bavarian painted glass, with the image painted in reverse, which was used largely for devotional art. And the artefacts they collected, including an entirely characteristic ex voto painting of a miracle story involving a wagon, and a decidedly birdlike image of the Holy Ghost as a dove, were, unsurprisingly folk Catholic, though the curators declare that the objects are seen without reference to their religious function.
And if further proof were needed of the religious dimension of The Blue Rider school it is evident in the almanac of that name, which includes among a variety of artistic products, the image of a Bavarian vision of the Virgin. And on the cover is the Blue Rider himself, in this case, St George.
The almanac gives the agenda for the movement as being not about a precise and particular form but how the innermost wish of the artist can be realised. And what a fascinating exercise it was.
In its apparent subversiveness it seems to belong to the Weimar Republic but no, this was a movement that came from the old Empires.
And like so many good things, it was brought to an end by the Great War, which killed some of its members – Marc died at Verdun – and dispersed the rest. What a ghastly, inutterable waste.
Photo: ‘Three Wise Men’, c.1911, by Maria Franck-Marc, Lenbachhaus Munich; image courtesy Tate Modern.
‘Expressionists, Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider’ is showing at Tate Modern 25 April – 20 October 2024.
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