Blaue Reiter, Der

Blaue Reiter, Der (The Blue Rider). A loose association of artists formed in Munich in December 1911 as a splinter group from the Neue Künstlervereinigung; it held only two exhibitions (poorly received by press and public) and was broken up by the First World War, but its brief life is considered to mark the high point of German Expressionism. The name was also used as the title of an ‘Almanac’ (a collection of essays and illustrations) published in May 1912 by Kandinsky (the driving force behind the group) and Marc (another of the major figures); the cover of the Almanac featured a drawing by Kandinsky of a blue horseman (blue was the favourite colour of Marc, who regarded it as particularly spiritual, and the horse was his most cherished subject; Kandinsky, too, liked blue and often painted horses with riders, evoking ideas of medieval knights or warrior saints).

Unlike the members of Die Brücke, the main artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter (including Klee and Macke) were not stylistically unified, although their work tended towards the spiritual (contrasting with the more earthy concerns of Die Brücke) and also towards abstraction. They had no artistic or social programme and no plans for communal activities apart from exhibitions. According to a statement in the catalogue of their first exhibition, their aim was ‘simply to juxtapose the most varied manifestations of the new painting on an international basis…and to show, by the variety of forms represented, the manifold ways in which the artist manifests his inner desire’. The exhibition, arranged at very short notice, was held in Munich in December 1911 and featured 43 works by fourteen artists; in March 1912 it travelled to Berlin to inaugurate the Sturm Gallery, and it was also shown (with some additions) in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hagen. The second exhibition, held in Munich in February–April 1912, included only watercolours, drawings, and prints, but it was larger and broader in scope than the first show, featuring 315 works by 31 artists, among them Braque, Derain, Goncharova, Klee, Larionov, Picasso, and Vlaminck. Although Jawlensky's work was not included in either of the two official group shows, he did exhibit alongside Kandinsky, Klee, Macke, and Marc at the Sturm Gallery in 1913 and he is generally considered part of the Blaue Reiter circle; indeed, it is to these five that the idea of a Blaue Reiter ‘group’ chiefly applies. Feininger, also, showed his work with this group at the Sturm exhibition.