Kandinsky, Münter and Werefkin : Tate Modern spotlights the Expressionist Blue Rider
We visit Tate Modern's latest exhibition showcasing one of the twentieth century's most influential groups...
By
Susan Gray
April 30, 2024
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
Springing the Blue Rider group free from the narrow textbook definition of a collective of artists active in Munich in the early 1900s, Tate Modern sets out to show the group’s transnational roots, and their continuing influence on art after the Second World War. This is the first Blue Rider show in the UK for 60 years, and 50 works have never been shown in the UK until now, including pieces by overlooked artists including Wladimir Burljuk and Maria Franck.
Opening with Gabrielle Münter’s photographs of Texas and St Louis 1899 -1901, recording the journey she made to see American family after losing both parents aged 21, the show highlights the role of women in the Blue Rider. Images of domestic scenes and social inequality, shot with a Kodak No 2 Bullseye camera, capable of taking 12 images without reloading, demonstrate Münter’s prescient engagement with technology and modern life.
In later rooms, the Blue Rider artists’ interest in world religions - especially Buddhism and Theosophy - is explored in relation to Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). The text communicates a vision for a new ‘great spiritual’ age in which all art forms would coalesce. The Blue Rider’s most celebrated works are placed in the context of spiritual development, including the poster image Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc. Wild animal energy is evoked by the coiled geometric forms and intense primary colours, and the animal’s markings and anatomical delineation are echoed by the jagged, brilliant, blue and red shapes of its lair. Marc’s rendering of the tiger – an animal important to Buddhist tradition – was informed by the artist’s interest in spiritual teachings as well as Japanese prints. Nearby Kandinsky’s All Saints I (1911), St George III from the same year and Improvisation Deluge (1913), showcase the artist’s development of abstraction to materialise visions of ‘inner sound’. Kandinsky saw his experiments with non-figuration as inextricably linked to his spiritual quest.
Kandinsky was Münter’s teacher at the Phalanx artists association and school of painting in Munich, where they met in 1902. A year earlier Münter had moved to the city’s Schwabing district, a progressive neighbourhood housing the university and art school. Munich’s relatively tolerant attitudes, for the period, played a key role in the Blue Rider’s transnationalism and diversity, as artists from the more repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires found a home there. The rural Bavarian alpine town of Murnau - an hour’s train journey from Munich - also influenced approaches to form and colour through the landscape, along with folk art traditions such as reverse glass painting, which gave images on glass the appearance of solid colour.
Curators Natalia Sidlina and Genevieve Barton place Münter and Kandinsky at the centre of the movement. In this narration, the couple are the axis around which the group revolves. This is a breakaway and expansion from traditional accounts, which typically date the founding of the Blue Rider to Kandinsky meeting German artist Franz Marc at a New Year party in 1911 thrown by Marianne Werekin at her salon. The next day they saw an Arnold Schonberg concert in Munich and embarked on a long friendship. Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), is the artist’s chromatic response to Schonberg’s atonal sounds, and visitors to Tate’s exhibition are invited to experience the Blue Rider’s engagement with sound while listening to Schonberg’s music.
Werefkin was an heiress who ran a salon in Munich. Werekin’s The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff (1909), is another opening work in the show, highlighting the group’s embrace of gender nonconformity. Werefkin’s privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed her to assume a position of power, acting as a patron and supporter of the arts – a role usually occupied by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative title ‘manwoman’, denoting a third sex; undermining gender binaries, Werekin even stated that ‘I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am I’. In her portrayal of Sacharoff, the performer has a brown, long bobbed hairstyle, Cabaret-style red rosebud lips, coloured inside the natural lip line, and holds a stylised mauve and red flower by a thin stem. A blue robe drapes over the performer’s right shoulder, nearest the viewer, implying the other shoulder is bare.
Photographs of Sachahroff in long robes capture the fluidity of his movement and choreographic experimentation, inspired by free movement pioneer Sarah Bernhardt. Werekin’s sketchbooks capture the same gestural energy. Affirmation of performance art is one of the Blue Rider’s many legacies to later generations of artists.
In May 1912 the Blue Rider Almanac was published with contributions from Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke, together with medieval images and folk art, as well as essays by composers Schonberg and Alexander Scriabin. The group held its wesecond exhibition in the same year, Marc and Kandinsky having resigned from the New Munich Artists Association the year before.
Two years later the First World War broke out, and many of the collective had to return to their original, now enemy, states. Franz Marc died in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun. But the Blue Rider’s energy in promoting their work and each other, their ability to rapidly put on salons and produce manifestos, translated into four languages, lives on in the art world we know today.
Expressionists Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is showing at Tate Modern until 20th October.
