Emily LaBarge
A show at Tate Modern presents the wild, colorful orbit of the early twentieth-century Blue Rider artists.
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, installation view. Courtesy Tate Modern. Photo: Larina Fernandes. © Tate. Pictured, center: Franz Marc, Tiger, 1912.
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider,
curated by Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, through October 20, 2024
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Admit it—you, too, sometimes dream of escaping the confines of modern life for a rural idyll where the fecund creative mind, unbound from its dirty urban fetters and banal social responsibilities, can thrive and flourish, think freely. Arles in the South of France, Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau, Skagen at the northern tip of the Danish Peninsula, Taos in New Mexico, Byrdcliffe and, later, East Hampton in New York. Any will do, but for a tightly knit group of artists, for a brief window in early twentieth-century Germany, it was Schwabing, a bohemian borough at the northeast edge of Munich, and the verdant Murnau am Staffelsee at the foot of the Bavarian Alps.
Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Composition VII, 1913. Courtesy Lenbachhaus Munich.
Place—idealistic, bucolic, escapist, delusional, genuinely liberating—is one of the most interesting lenses applied to the Expressionists and the Blue Rider group in a new retrospective of their vivid canvases, folk objects, and interdisciplinary publications at Tate Modern. Occupying the same galleries as last summer’s Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, which examined the shared philosophies and mysticisms of the two likewise turn-of-twentieth-century European painters, this show also considers a broadly defined “spiritualism” that fueled the German-based cluster of artists who hailed from across the Continent’s more eastern reaches.
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, installation view. Courtesy Tate Modern. Photo: Larina Fernandes. © Tate.
Biographies of the group’s core members are eccentric and heterogeneous, intersecting at various times and locales. The best known, Wassily Kandinsky, was born in Moscow and raised in Odesa, then migrated to Munich in 1896 to study. There, he met Gabriele Münter, eleven years younger and born in Prussian-era Berlin, with whom he traveled across Europe and North Africa from 1904 to 1908—an unconventional relationship, as Kandinsky was still married to his cousin. Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin were both from aristocratic families of the Russian Empire (he from Torzhok, she from Tula). They met in a painting class in St. Petersburg and became life-partners (never wed), also moving to Munich in 1896. Franz Marc was born in Munich (then the capital of German Empire Bavaria), departed to see art and culture in Italy and France from 1902 to 1903, and then returned to become a book illustrator. Also (again) already married (a theme), he began an enduring romance with Maria Franck, an artist from Berlin studying at the Ladies Academy of the Royal School of Art in Munich.
Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin, 1909. Courtesy Lenbachhaus Munich. © DACS.
The list could go on, and does, including more Jewish, women, migrant, and, later, exiled artists. Artists living in alternative relationships, orphaned aristocrat artists with financial freedom, artists who died young of general ill-health or in military action on the Western Front. The show features seventeen in total. For a few brilliant years, these painters and others congregated at the so-called “pink salon,” Werefkin’s apartment in Schwabing (she rented the entire floor at 23 Giselastrasse, two apartments facing each other across the hall: one for her, the other for Jawlensky), where they discussed art education, contemporary culture, and philosophy, and hatched plans for their own schools and exhibitions. “Schwabing was a spiritual island in the great world, in Germany, mostly in Munich itself,” Kandinsky wrote in a letter to the artist Paul Westheim in 1930. “There I painted the first abstract picture. There I concerned myself with thoughts about ‘pure’ painting, pure art.”
Marianne von Werefkin, Self-portrait I, ca. 1910. Courtesy Lenbachhaus Munich.
In 1909, his painterly concerns continued forty miles south of Munich in Murnau, where Münter bought a property that became locally known as the “Russenhaus” (Russian House). They painted its exterior in blue, white, yellow, and amber, and decorated its interior with patterns, dots, lines, and images of the horse-and-rider design that would become the emblem of the Blue Rider group when it was hatched in their garden with Marc and Franck-Marc (Maria’s hyphenate adopted surname) in 1911. “Der Blaue Reiter” was fantastically titled (Kandinsky and Marc merely liked the image, though the former was also an equine obsessive—“how does a horse see the world?” he once asked) and its project was both utopian and deeply personal. The aim was “a union of various countries to serve one purpose,” wrote Kandinsky and Marc. “The whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity.” This vision appealed to artists with wildly varied practices and produced the loosely conceived Expressionism—more of an atmosphere or a striving rather than a series of delineated tendencies. But the “movement” itself was also underpinned by intimate relationships, aesthetic affinities, and a truly modern, intensely fragile—and soon-to-be-violently-extinguished—sense of unified international identity.
Robert Delaunay, Circular Shapes, Moon no. 1, 1913. Courtesy Lenbachhaus Munich and Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation.
And I realize I have mentioned no actual works yet. Not Kandinsky’s big and bright 1913 Study for Composition VII, in which hues of yellow, green, blush pink, cornflower blue are pushed around the canvas by writhing lines and strokes of black, orange, brown, never stopping. Not Marc’s vivid 1912 canvases of a doe and a tiger hidden in densely geometric landscapes. Not August Macke’s Walk on the Bridge (1913), with its urbane strolling couples. Not Robert Delaunay’s Circular Shapes, Moon no. 1 (1913), so admired by Kandinsky that he included it in the second of two Blue Rider exhibitions, before the group was suddenly disbanded by the arrival of war.
Elisabeth Epstein, Self-Portrait, 1911. Courtesy Lenbachhaus Munich.
These paintings and others run colorful and wild through the more than ten rooms of the exhibition. But what I noticed above all—amid the brilliant palettes and bold brushstrokes, the emphasis on translating interior states into abstract forms—is that it’s the people who make the place. The most arresting works here are the tenderest, the portraits and self-portraits frequently painted by women of women. In 1909, Münter painted the “Werefkina,” as they called her, in oblongs of opalescent white and dusky pink, her cheeky face chartreuse with blue highlights. Werefkin’s 1910 self-portrait shows her in the same flowered hat aged fifty, her glowing orange eyes fixing you on the spot. Elisabeth Epstein (who introduced Robert Delaunay to the Blue Riders) painted herself in 1911, eyes closed, white shirt coming undone. Her skin is yellow, pink, green, blue, impossible shades and as fabulous as any abstraction.
Gabriele Münter, Three Women in their Sunday Best, Marshall, Texas, 1900, printed 2006–7. Courtesy Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation. © DACS.
Particularly special, perhaps, are not the paintings at all but a series of black-and-white photographs taken by Münter on a visit to the United States with her sister from 1898 to 1900, following the deaths of their parents. Sunset on the Return Voyage from the USA, Steamship “Pennsylvania” (1900) is a Whistler-esque scene of grays and blacks, a bright prick of white just visible on a distant rippling horizon. Three Women in their Sunday Best, Marshall, Texas, of the same year, shows three Black women in pale, blooming finery, curiosity on their faces turned to the lens. On a later trip to Tunisia, Münter was likewise struck by women in public spaces: Street Scene with Women in Traditional and Men in European Dress (1905) captures just what it says, but the men appear drab in dark, fitted garb, while the women shine in sinuous white robes. Yes, the people are the place, and you have to look outside to see inside, inside to see outside. The result, like the world, like the Expressionists and the Blue Rider enterprises alike, will be as universal as it is idiosyncratic.
Emily LaBarge is a writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, frieze, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. Excerpts appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Granta and the autumn 2023 issue of Mousse.