Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider looks to capture an exhilarating few years of Expressionist experimentation in Europe — an art epoch that was as colourful, playful, and ephemeral as a soap bubble.
The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was an international circle of artists that formed in Germany in 1911 and dispersed in 1914 following the outbreak of the First World War — a spectre that haunts the exhibit. Joined by their interest in colour, symbolism, and free self-expression, the Blue Rider artists eventually produced an eponymous publication, The Blue Rider Almanac, an anthology of modern art and ideology first circulated in the spring of 1912. At the core of the collective – and of this new exhibition – are two dyads: Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, and Franz Marc and Marianne von Werefkin.
With over 130 works featured, the exhibit sprawls, accumulating momentum slowly and at times unevenly. Vast and thorny socio-political topics — gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, environmentalism, social inequality, imperialism, and colonialism — are trumpeted early, only for the majority to be touched glancingly and didactically.
But a consistent, deep focus on long under-appreciated women artists, especially Münter and Werefkin, adds a new, touching richness; their intimacy and merriment ground the exhibit. And in the latter rooms, Expressionists becomes positively thrilling as a kind of kunstlerroman for Kandinsky, tracing his flight into spirituality and abstraction. The exhibit ends before Kandinsky simplified his formal language, pausing like a swing at its highest point: all potential energy held in a synaesthetic, eschatological profusion of colour, music, and shapes.
Early in the exhibit, Gabriele Münter’s portraits offer good-humoured, welcoming introductions of her friends. In Listening (Portrait of Jawlensky, 1909), Münter affectionately depicts Blue Rider affiliate Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky, sitting at the dinner table in warm lamplight. Her thick brushwork affects spontaneity, but that’s belied by her carefully-drafted outlines. Those thick black lines — some round, some angular — define discrete and recognisable features within the characteristically bold colour palette: Jawlensky’s bow-tie is a green box perched atop his slouching, tweedy torso; his quizzically arched eyebrows sit like upturned parentheses. And his hairless head, painted jovially pink with blue-button eyes and a green beard, is that of a gingerbread man.
Münter wrote that the painting “represents Jawlensky, with an expression of puzzled astonishment on his chubby face, listening to Kandinsky’s new theories of art.” An offstage Kandinsky, then, is perhaps the real butt of her gentle ribbing; with the food sitting cold, one imagines he has been holding forth for quite some time.
Kandinsky comes on stage in a later, dovetailing Münter painting, Kandinsky and Erma Bossi (1910). Again, a guest at the table listens (maybe enrapt, maybe captive) as a bespectacled Kandinsky pontificates, his hand raised insistently. Remnants of realism — in Bossi’s posture, the wall art’s grey rim of shadow, the tablecloth’s frothing folds — accentuate the cozy domesticity of the scene against modernist departures in colour and perspective (the carpet seems flat and yet quivers with depth.) An empty chair is pulled out at an angle from the table, as if someone has just left the room; indeed the painting is situated invitingly, like the viewer has just entered to fill this empty seat. That is, if we want to be lectured. Münter both celebrates and winks, tenderly, at Kandinsky’s zeal.
Alongside Münter’s portraits of the Blue Riders are their own self-portraits, placing the social and collaborative aspect of the group in contrast with its focus on expressive individualism. Elisabeth Epstein’s Self Portrait (1911) is gorgeously delicate; her yellows, greens, and pinks are tempered almost into pastels to catch the play of light across the architecture of her collarbones and neck, her round upper arms, and the softness under her eyes, which are closed or downcast: perhaps she is looking at a reflection in the mirror. Lifting a chemise to cover her decolletage, her position is simultaneously suggestive and demure. Both arms move inwards, a kind of literal self-containment, abetted by the portrait’s crop, which cuts her off at her lap.
There’s a form-content synergy here: the nature of a self-portrait is limited, suspect disclosure, an incomplete yielding of privacy. Epstein’s partial state of undress, her gaze away, her cropped framing, her attempt to both cover and reveal all cohere thematically as the formal dilemma of the portrait.
Marianne von Werefkin’s Self Portrait (c. 1910) also depicts the artist with vibrantly pink and yellow skin. But beyond that, the women’s self-portraits could not be more different. Werefkin meets our gaze head-on. And what a gaze she returns, her eyes painted a lurid, diabolical orange. Werefkin painted this for her fiftieth birthday; she looks regal, her neck elongated, her red lips pursed contemptuously. The exhibition text describes this as an attempt to “confront gender stereotypes” — rather feeble language for the fiery-orbed woman so radically self-possessed she once said “I am not a man, I am not a woman, I am I.”
After some slow interstitial sections — including miscellaneous collected objects from the artists’ ethnographic expeditions — Expressionists picks up steam again with a renewed focus on Kandinsky. In Murnau – Johannisstrasse from a Window of the Griesbräu (1908), Kandinsky illustrates Murnau, a rural village at the base of the Bavarian Alps where he and much of the Blue Rider gang spent their summers. Their time in Murnau was an inflection point; the landscape inspired Kandinsky’s first non-figurative paintings. Murnau – Johannisstrasse evinces the very beginning of that transition: While naturalism and linear perspective still undergird the composition, a latent passion animates the rushing pink road and thatched roofs.
The Cow (1910) marks a further step in Kandinsky’s turn to abstraction. Figures hover at the brink of illegibility: there’s a cow, and a person milking it; maybe there are a few more cows in the background. But the cow’s spots are golden like egg yolks, and its white back disappears, edgeless, into the hill behind it. To move up the painting is to move away from realism: the hills and the sky are streaky oceanic slashes; strange orange flames flicker in the distance like birthday candles. So The Cow is a microcosm of the transition, containing both an outwardly-observed pastoral scene and the internal vision it stimulated.
But it’s in Kandinsky’s encounters with music that he truly unshackles himself. He painted six paintings (Impressions) after attending an Arnold Schoenberg concert in the winter of 1911. In Schoenberg’s atonal compositions Kandinsky heard his paintings — or, as he wrote in a letter to Schoenberg, “the particular destinies, the autonomous paths, the very lives of individual voices in your compositions are precisely what I have been looking for in pictorial form.” Impression III (Concert, 1911) has the last dregs of his figurative style, with some indication of an audience and a stage. But it’s more transposition than representation, sound into pure colour: a wash of yellow, discordant crags of blue, the piano a black hole at the centre.
Kandinsky may have had synaesthesia, wherein certain sensory pathways connect and trigger each other. In his central work of aesthetic theory, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky distilled both that condition and a possible interpretation of Impression III through the metaphor of the piano: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings,” he wrote. “The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
Improvisation Gorge (1914) vibrates like a gaseous state: turbulent, riotous, climbing. A ladder-like form suggests reaching towards heaven, or even beyond, to something extraterrestrial. The hues feel ecstatic but also anxious — apocalyptic rather than eschatological, anticipating the catastrophe of the war. Some shapes look like monstrous musical instruments; the title again suggests an intuitive movement from music to painting, what the exhibit terms “vibrations of the ‘inner sound.’”
These later Kandinsky paintings are so numinous and kinetic that they threaten to blanch the surrounding works; one can imagine other Blue Riders’ bruised resignation at Kandinsky’s obvious ascendancy. And to speak candidly, visitors may want to be selective in their engagement with the non-Kandinsky content. Although I appreciated the exhibit’s sweeping approach, it occasionally veered into undiscriminating and desultory inclusions, like entire walls of Münter’s grainy and amateur holiday photos. Likewise, some tangents pay off more than others: The context given on colour theory and synaesthesia contribute pedagogical robustness and accessibility, but the raised and unanswered sociological questions lacked depth — I was more interested in the fates of the central artists than how peripheral ones did or didn’t subvert gender in dance.
The First World War forced the Blue Riders to leave Germany. Kandinsky eventually fled to Russia, effectively ending his relationship with Münter. Werefkin and Jawlensky went to Switzerland. And Franz Marc, whose menacing, cubist-inflected Tiger (1912) is the promotional image of the exhibit, was killed in battle. Later many of the Blue Rider works were denigrated in the Nazis’ infamous 1937 Degenerate Art show. Expressionists ultimately has a bimodal effect: One feels humility in the presence of such mystical, ethereal creators, but also the godly, ironic awareness of their outcomes: the tragedy and greatness that await them.
With thanks to Talia Blatt for this review.
