Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider – Review

By Clare Jenkins

The front cover of Expressionists shows a mustard-coloured tiger looking warily over its shoulder at us, amid a jungle of red, green and blue. Tiger, painted in 1912, is one of Franz Marc’s best-known paintings, shown to particularly striking effect in last year’s Expressionists exhibition at London’s Tate Modern. There, it shared a wall with some of the artist’s other animal paintings: the similarly timid Doe in the Monastery Garden and Deer in the Woods II, and In the Rain, showing (if you look hard enough) the painter, his wife Maria Franck-Marc and their dog Rossi, one paw delicately raised. All are characterised by a real empathy towards our fellow creatures.

Together on the wall, they were mesmerising in their dramatic poses, bright, primary colours and geometric lines. As the book, a series of illustrated essays edited by the Tate’s Natalia Sidlina, says, ‘He found his subject in animals and the natural world’. And, as the First World War loomed, the Munich-born Marc’s style evolved to express anxiety about the approaching apocalypse. Hence those cautious looks, those eyes afraid of humans.

How right they were to be fearful. When war broke out, Marc was drafted into the Imperial German Army and died at Verdun in 1916, aged just 36. Which leaves you wondering what more he could have achieved.

Six years earlier, he had met artist August Macke and encountered the work of the New Munich Artists’ Association (NKVM). Founded in 1909 by the aristocratic Russian Marianne Werefkin and her partner and protégé Alexej Jawlensky, the association was an Expressionist art group that flourished – despite one critic attacking them as ‘incurably insane’.

The book, like the exhibition, traces their story from the first steps of their artistic journey to the flowering of Expressionism in all its exhilarating riot of colour.

The back cover, for instance, has Gabriele Münter’s Portrait of Marianne Werefkin ( ‘the soul of the whole operation’, according to Marc) staring straight out at us, the whites of her eyes turned startling blue under a multi-coloured wide-brimmed hat. Münter, who was also a photographer, was the long-term partner of Wassily Kandinsky, who was also key to this ground-breaking movement of artists who came together in Munich in the early years of the 20th Century. Along with Marc, he founded the hugely influential Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Riders), based in the Bavarian town of Murnau and ‘a driving force within an active international network of modernist artists across Europe and beyond’.

Those artists came from all over: the Russian Empire (Jawlensky and Werefkin among them), the Austro-Hungarian Empire (dancer Alexander Sacharoff, painter Erma Bossi), France and Switzerland (Paul Klee).

Some felt marginalised in their own countries: artists with Jewish heritage, for instance, like Sacharoff, Albert Bloch and Elisabeth Epstein, women wanting to escape social conventions (Franck-Marc and Münter), men like Kandinsky looking to escape the pressures of social expectation.

“Unspoilt creativity”

In her essay, Isabel Wünsche, professor of art history at Constructor University in Bremen, writes: ‘Promoting a universal understanding of art, the Blue Rider artists transcended national borders, traditional artistic categories and concepts of high and low art’. Elsewhere, the book states, ‘they came together to form, in their own words, “a union of various countries to serve one purpose” – to transform modern art.’

They did this by experimenting with colour, form and light, creating astonishingly dynamic art with bold brushstrokes, sometimes in a swirling vortex of colour.

Turn-of-the-century Munich provided a relatively liberal and progressive environment for this range of diverse artists to experiment in. They shared a radical spirit, as shown in Bossi’s Circus with its curious perspectives, Münter’s portrait-without-faces of Jawlensky and Werefkin, and Werefkin’s own self-portrait with blazing red eyes and a challenging stare (the artists often painted each other).

In 1909 Kandinsky and Münter bought a house in Murnau – The House of the Russians, as it became known. Jawlensky and Werefkin were already there and the quartet embraced both the locality – walking, cycling, wild swimming – and the lifestyle, sometimes adopting Bavarian dress, cultivating a kitchen garden, engaging with local folk traditions, arts and crafts, including religious painting. As one essay puts it, Murnau ‘became both a country retreat and the unlikely site of the birth of abstraction’.

The Blue Riders’ work spanned painting – including reverse glass painting – printmaking, woodcuts and books. Though they were highly influential, they actually only ever held two exhibitions. Yet their influence was huge, not just artistically but also through their views on gender (Sacharoff, whom Werefkin often painted, was what we now call non-binary, performing in women’s or androgynous costumes), and on social and economic inequalities.

In fact, many of them were upper-middle-class, affluent and cosmopolitan in outlook, travelling widely and being influenced by those experiences, particularly in Tunisia, where the North African light changed their approach to colour.

They also believed in children’s unspoilt creativity, and some of the works are almost deliberately childlike: Münter’s cartoonish portrait of Jawlensky, Listening, for instance, and her Madonna with Child painting on glass. Also Jawlensky’s Landscape near Murnau.

Gradually, wider anxieties creep into some of their work. Werefkin’s 1910 Into the Night, for example, shows a ‘king’ in a red cloak and a shrouded woman slinking away from a lantern-lit house in a dark alley. And her Red Tree shows a whitewashed little church dwarfed by a blue, white-topped icy peak, a woman sitting under a fiery red tree. There’s a sense of foreboding here – as in Albert Bloch’s Entombment, which shows a shrouded figure being carried, presumably to its grave.

That same year, Franz Marc, August Macke and Paul Klee were all conscripted into the German army while ‘enemy aliens’ were told to leave the country, Kandinsky among them. Marc, Macke and the Ukrainian artist Wladimir Burljuk were all killed. The circle of the Blue Rider was broken.

‘Expressionists; Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider’, edited by Natalia Sidlina, is published by Tate Enterprises Ltd, £32