Active for just three years and bound by community, the Expressionist artists of the Blue Rider were totally unique. Their ideas had deep roots which helped shape Modernism, finds
Martha Alexander
IN DEPTH
“WE WERE ONLY A GROUP OF FRIENDS who shared a common passion for painting as a form of self-expression. Each of us was interested in the work of the other, in the health and happiness of the others.” It’s a warming statement from Gabriele Münter in 1958, reflecting on Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), a Munich-based network of both German and international artists to which she and other Expressionists, including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, had belonged from 1911 until 1914.
Münter also noted that the Blue Rider seemed much less competitive than other art collectives or schools active during the same period. This central theme of friendship – rather than ambition – is at the heart of the forthcoming Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider exhibition at Tate Modern.
“This is something that will resonate with audiences of practicing artists,” says Natalia Sidlina, the exhibition’s curator. “We’ll show how a communal approach helped so many artists with very different biographies and experiences to gain this momentum and make Modernism what we know of it nowadays. It’s a very personal story which we will tell through biographies of artists and their intimate collaborators: couples, best friends and soulmates; all purely people connected by a common call in their artistic practice.”
The story of the Blue Rider – its ethos, its spirituality and what it paved the way for ▸ – will be told comprehensively with paintings from the Tate’s own collections, masterpieces from Lenbachhaus in Munich and pieces from private collectors.
The show at Tate Modern will of course address the network’s enigmatic, mysterious name. The Blue Rider is derived from a 1903 Kandinsky painting of the same name depicting a man in a bright blue cloak riding a horse across a bucolic landscape – ostensibly departing the ‘real world’ into a fantasy realm. It was one of Kandinsky’s last Impressionist paintings and included several nods to abstraction and the Expressionist movement which he would go on to influence so heavily.
Kandinsky created another ‘blue rider’ – this time for the cover of a 1912 almanac
