BERLIN.- Founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc as an editorial collective in 1911, Der Blaue Reiter entered the public eye with exhibitions and the publication of a programmatic almanac in 1912 with a bold sense of mission. In the creative centers of Munich, Murnau, Sindelsdorf, and Berlin, Der Blaue Reiter emerged as a circle of artists who rejected conventional conceptions of art and propagated new aesthetic ideas—a loose construct that once again dissolved with the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914. 100 selected works, including loans from the Kunstbibliothek, the Museum Europäischer Kulturen, the Neue Nationalgalerie, and private collections in Berlin, reveal the multifaceted cosmos of Der Blaue Reiter and its quest for new creative paths in art.

Wassily Kandinsky

The legal scholar and ethnologist Wassily Kandinsky left Moscow and came to Munich in 1896 to pursue a career as an artist. There he studied with teachers including Franz von Stuck. In 1901 he helped found the short-lived Phalanx art school, where he met Gabriele Münter. In 1909, both became members of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association Munich).

Kandinsky’s painting and printmaking were initially influenced by Jugendstil as well as by the Russian fairytales and sagas depicted in popular folk prints, a number of which were in the artist’s possession. Soon, however, Kandinsky abandoned clear figuration, liberating his colors and forms from any reference to the outside world. For him, they became sounds, as expressed in the title of his album Klänge (Sounds) from 1913. His enthusiasm for the atonal music of Arnold Schönberg provided an impetus for this new path, which he developed theoretically in his publications Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the almanac Der Blaue Reiter. In his printmaking, too, it is often the figure of a rider that plunges as the warrior of a new art into increasingly abstract visual worlds.

Franz Marc

After a disappointing two-year course of study at the conservative Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Franz Marc worked as an independent artist from 1903 on. His first solo exhibition took place at the Galerie Brakl in 1910. The exhibition poster, which depicts two cats, reflects the character of his early lithographs from before 1910, which are still marked by naturalism and a muted color scheme.

Animals remained Marc’s primary motif throughout his life. For him, they embodied innocence, originality and a life of harmony with nature, from which civilized humanity had become estranged.

Marc discussed new forms of creativity and spirituality with Wassily Kandinsky. As authors and organizers, they formed the center of Der Blaue Reiter. The woodcuts Marc created within this context from 1912 on bear witness to his stylistic transformation. With their striking black and white contrasts, expressive use of line, and abstract formal language, they exemplify his desire to capture only the essence of the animal, its inner being. For Marc, the symbolism of color likewise played an important role, with blue standing for “the masculine“ and “the spiritual“ and yellow representing “the feminine“ and “the sensuality“.

Else Lasker-Schüler and Franz Marc

From 1913 to 1916, Franz Marc and the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who lived in Berlin, corresponded by mail in an exchange that from an artistic standpoint was extremely productive: each of their letters and postcards was illustrated or accompanied by drawings.

An important figure in this context was the fictional character of Prince Jussuf of Thebes (King Malik), invented by Lasker-Schüler based on the Old Testament story of Joseph and the influence of Near Eastern cultures.

The poet Lasker-Schüler, who until 1912 was married to the gallerist Herwarth Walden as her second husband, used the figure of Prince Yussuf as an alter ego in a self created poetic world that came to expression in numerous publications. Franz Marc purposefully responded to this cosmos as a “Blue Rider” in drawings on letters and postcards until 1914.

Many of the drawings and postcards created by the two artists were lost during the Nazi confiscation of “Degenerate Art” in 1937. The letters from Lasker-Schüler to Marc, however, came in 1981 to the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach.

August Macke

Like Franz Marc, August Macke turned his back on traditional art training in 1906 after only two years at the academy in Düsseldorf. Instead, he pursued his own educational interests at the school of applied arts in that city as well as the private art school of Lovis Corinth in Berlin.

Impressed by the works of Franz Marc, Macke visited the latter’s studio in 1910 and subsequently participated in the editorial work on the almanac The Blue Rider. He also took part in the two exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter in 1911–12. His art was less theoretically oriented than that of Marc and Kandinsky and focused instead on the earthly paradise of bourgeois life. Stylistically indebted to the French art of his day, Macke often depicted strolling figures pursuing leisure activities. The high point of his painted oeuvre are the watercolors he created in Morocco in 1914, flooded with light and color.

Macke was critical of Kandinsky’s theory and authority and distanced himself from Der Blaue Reiter in 1912. His friendship with Marc, however, continued until his early death in World War I.

The Black and White Exhibition

In February 1912, the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter opened at the gallery of Hans Goltz in Munich. While the first show had focused on painting, now the curators Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky brought together 315 works by thirty-four artists under the motto “Schwarz-Weiss“ (Black and White). The Kupferstichkabinett’s holdings of modern art make it possible to retrace the stylistic spectrum of the exhibition.

The presentation, which was shown only in Munich, included prints, drawings, and watercolors by “wild ones” (Franz Marc) from many countries in Europe. Marc advocated for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein, despite their lack of affinity with Kandinsky’s notion of a new, “spiritually” motivated art. Some of the French Cubists were also absent, since their art was allegedly too ossified in external forms; an exception was Robert Delaunay, an artist revered by Franz Marc and August Macke. André Derain was also represented, as were Russian artists like Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

Blue Rideresses

The project Neuerscheinungen hrsg. von Daniela Comani (New Publications edited by Daniela Comani), launched by Berlin artist Daniela Comani in 2007, calls attention to the frequent lack of visibility for women. By manipulating book titles, she effects an exchange of roles that produces a subtle change of perspective.

In the case of Die Blaue Reiterin (The Blue Rideress), she shifts the focus to the women who played an active role in defining the artistic avant-garde, especially those who took part in the project of Der Blaue Reiter.

In this context, Gabriele Münter, Maria Franck-Marc, Elisabeth Macke, and Marianne von Werefkin were important protagonists—as artists, partners, and friends. Münter constantly balanced her own artistic ambitions with her role as the supportive companion of Wassily Kandinsky.

The cosmos of Der Blaue Reiter also included women who had achieved recognition in the European art scene of the day and showed an aesthetic affinity to the Munich circle, such as the Dutch artist Jacoba van Heemskerck or the Russian Natalia Goncharova.

Der Sturm in Berlin

The poet, publisher, and gallerist Georg Lewin (1878–1941), who received the pseudonym Herwarth Walden from his first wife Else Lasker-Schüler, was one of the most important promoters of the avant-garde in Berlin of his day. His gallery Der Sturm provided a platform for many artists: his inaugural show in March 1912 featured the first Munich exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter—along with paintings by figures such as Natalia Goncharova.

The first issue of the magazine Der Sturm had been published two years earlier, illustrated with prints by numerous protagonists of the artists’ groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka was the first to contribute drawings, and even created a poster.

In 1913, Walden had an influence on the stylistic development of Heinrich Campendonk, the youngest of the artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter. Campendonk’s potential as a printmaker did not begin to emerge until 1916, when he created woodcuts inspired by Franz Marc exploring the cosmic connection between man and nature.

The Blue Rider Almanac

Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc had been planning a publication on the arts of their time since the summer of 1911 and envisioned an annual almanac. The first and only volume was printed in May 1912 by the publisher Reinhard Piper in Munich. It was financed by the Berlin industrialist and art collector Bernhard Koehler (1849–1927), the uncle of Elisabeth Macke.

The richly illustrated almanac (2nd ed., 1914) not only surveyed the art of its time, but also integrated numerous works from non- European and European cultures. Reverse glass paintings and votive panels from Bavaria were likewise included, as were folk prints from Russia and children’s drawings. The editors of the almanac appreciated the sometimes naïve, sometimes fantastical realism of such works, a quality they also found in the prints of Alfred Kubin and Paul Klee. The almanac also explored contemporary music and concluded with examples of scores by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Alexej von Jawlensky

In September 1913, the gallerist Herwarth Walden organized the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) in Berlin, the largest exhibition of modern art in Germany prior to World War I. The show, curated by Franz Marc and August Macke, focused on the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, although numerous other protagonists of the European art scene such as the Italian Futurists were also represented. Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, who were friends of Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, now joined the circle of Der Blaue Reiter as well. Until 1912, both of them still belonged to the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association Munich).

In 1924, Jawlensky formed the artists’ group Die Blaue Vier along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger, who now taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In the United States, they were marketed by the gallerist Galka Scheyer as The Blue Four.