Der Blaue Reiter

“Art today is moving in directions of which our forebears had no inkling,” wrote Franz Marc in 1912. “The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are heard galloping through the air; artistic excitement can be felt all over Europe – new artists are signaling to one another from all sides; a glance, a touch of the hand, is enough to convey understanding.” The previous year, Marc joined with Wassily Kandinsky and a number of other German and Russian émigré artists to form Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider): a group with diverse aesthetic approaches – variously inspired by Post-Impressionism, early Cubism, the art of medieval Europe and folk art of the world – but with a united belief in the spiritual power of color.

The first roilings of the Great War in 1914 foretold the end of the group after only three years, but its influence would reverberate across the generations.

The catalogue of the first Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1911 set forth the group’s ecumenical aim to “propagate…not one precise and special form, but…in the variety of the forms represented to show how the inner wish of the artists expresses itself.” Franz Marc’s work is recognizable for it frequent portrayal of animals – especially horses – fractured into cubist-like planes and rendered in vibrant primary colors. Kandinsky’s paintings from this period are more improvisational, featuring large expanses of color freed from the constraint of lines. Meanwhile, Albert Bloch, the only American artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter, painted ethereal human figures wafting through fructuous landscapes, and August Macke interpreted architecture and streetscapes with Orphist and Fauvist inflections.

In 1923, Kandinsky, Feininger, Klee and von Jawlensky regrouped to form Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), and would exhibit and lecture together in the United States and Mexico over the ensuing decade. Die Blaue Vier was the brainchild of painter and dealer Galka Scheyer, who was born into a Jewish family in Germany and settled in California in the 1920s. Her industrious promotion of Die Blaue Vier – which included lending paintings to Hollywood movie sets – did much to broaden the influence of European modernism in North America, with John Cage, Diego Rivera, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Edward Weston and Frank Lloyd Wright among those who became conversant with this rich body of work through Scheyer.

“I am sure of one thing,” wrote Marc to Kandinsky in 1911. “Many…young people full of energy will…be fired by enthusiasm for [Der Blaue Reiter Almanach] and will judge the world in accordance with it.” Indeed, despite the group’s short tenure, the group and its singular journal had a profound influence on subsequent generations of artists. Among those 20th-century painters who acknowledged a debt to Der Blaue Reiter included the Hungarian Béla Kádár, the American Marsden Hartley, the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, and the Swiss Johannes Itten. More broadly, Der Blaue Reiter was in the vanguard of the movement towards expressionism and abstraction, leading the way for Gorky, Pollock, Basquiat and their proliferation of artistic heirs today.

The work of Der Blaue Reiter can be seen in countless major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and the Albertina in Vienna. Also worthy of note is the August-Macke-Haus in Bonn and the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See, both of which feature permanent holdings from the artists’ estates as well as temporary exhibitions.