Expressionists: Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider

by Natalia Sidlina (Editor)

A crucial introduction to the origins of the German Expressionist movement and the influential Blue Rider group, focusing on their relationships and transcultural interests
 
Founded in Munich in the 1910s, the Blue Rider ( Der Blaue Reiter ) was a revolutionary group of artists that included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, and Marianne von Werefkin, among many others. Their experiments with abstraction were key to the development of German Expressionism, and their practice was stunningly varied. The group’s works encompassed painting, sculpture, design, curation, publishing, printmaking, textiles, performative arts, and even branched into theology and spirituality.
 
This book offers an essential overview of German Expressionism and the Blue Rider, with a particular focus on relationships, gender dynamics, and the group’s transcultural concerns. New scholarship from more than a dozen international experts illuminates these themes as well as questions of spatiality, studio practice, and networking, with particular focus on the contributions of the group’s women. This richly illustrated catalogue features works by these acclaimed artists along with a trove of materials from their personal collections, including travel photography, international art, crafts, and vernacular artifacts, and a comprehensive biographical section that serves as an important introduction to the group’s members, including those who are lesser known.
 
Published in association with Tate
 
Exhibition
 
Tate Modern, London
(April 25–October 20, 2024)

Genres: Art

240 pages, Hardcover

Published June 11, 2024

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title needs noting carefully. This exhibition catalogue is only about a component of Expressionism and it is not a particularly coherent account of that component either. The reason for it is not hard to find because it is an exercise in fashionable academic cultural politics.

The Exhibition at Tate Modern was certainly worthwhile in extending the range of works available to view that were related to the Blue Rider project. It is also not an unimportant project to remind us that there were at least two genders (arguably more) inter-relating within it.

From a visual position, it is hard to argue against the curation but the book is problematic on two counts - it heavily over-emphasises the role and importance of the women involved (part of a feminist cultural project) and the articles, nearly all by women, are almost uniformly turgid.

The book comes across as a weapon in the promotion of liberal values at possibly the final peak (2024) of the liberal-left ideology which dominates the publicly funded and privately sponsored public gallery world. We are being preached at here.

What Gabrielle Munter's photography has to do with Expressionism is unclear. Her own painting is not, well, startlingly original or interesting. Nor does Werefkin's work (mostly) inspire. Maria Franck-Marc might perhaps have something distinctive to say but there is little of her work here.

To be fair, much of the women's work will not have survived but it is no accident that the bulk of impressive images come from Kandinsky and Marc and (though there are less of these) Macke and Klee. Who is missing here is Sonia Delauney to represent something both strong and female.

The work being shown to us is certainly uneven, with far too much effort being made to demonstrate that the less interesting work must have equal value to the more interesting work - just to demonstrate gender equality. In the end, the forced thesis of equal value does not stand up.

I would not mind even the fact that, of the fifteen contributors, only two are fellow-travelling males if the whole had been drawn into a disciplined narrative rather than 'far too much information' presented as if it was all important. Much of it should have been reserved for scholarly monographs.

One bit of messaging is effectively conveyed - the multiculturalism (within a common European home) of the Expressionist project. This, of course, clarifies somewhat the bitter loathing of the movement amongst national socialists.

But, once again, it is hard to detach this historical fact on the ground, well within the confines of a still dynastic old Europe, from the much later attempt to convert the fact from a fact into a normative statement of current value linked to the values of today's liberal Europeans.

It is not that one should object at all to revising our narratives with forgotten facts (on the contrary we need more of this applied not only to past but to current narratives) but only at the attempt to impose an alternative ideological interpretation on those facts a little out of time and place.

I would have said that it was patronising but, at this point in history, it might better be termed matronising. We should see the past for what it was rather than try to redraft it even a little to fit with our current normative expectations designed to change contemporary belief and behaviour.

There is a deeper issue here about the falsity of narrative in general and the need to liberate ourselves from its necessity. We should decide what is wrong now and not keep going back to correct past wrongs like a dog to its vomit. The world we thus create is asking to be countered by darker forces.

Narrative struggle is dangerous because deliberate revisionist narratives create, by their very nature resentment and so resistance. They alienate. From there, counter-narratives equally detached from reality (like populism and traditionalism) emerge and the cycle starts all over again.

We will only have triumphed over this when the same gallery can put on a display of national socialist art as a historical fact and a brutally honest non-ideological retrospective of women's art through the centuries that explains the conditions of their inability to create as they might have done.

In the first case, we will have demonstrated our mature ability not to be terrorised by great art (Arno Breker) produced by and for bad people - that art is a thing and not a value. In the second, we will understand honestly that structures of power matter in ensuring we remain liberated.

We might equally want to know (without ideological implication) not only how patronage and the market operate in art (reasonably well understood now to the point of cynicism) but the mechanisms by which some working class artists broke through where many others could not.

We need to de-romanticise and de-ideologise the romantic attitude to art (the equivalent of Americans no longer believing Camus was a serious philosopher) and observe them as businesses that sell us the intangible - whether they be the workshops of Cranach or Koons.

What seems to have happened in our culture is that intangibles of power and belief have been transformed into intangibles of intellectual pride and belief in order to enter into the intangibility of money - or, as the Left likes to reify it, capitalism which, of course, is a form of power and belief.

We need to have open eyes to the structures of ideological manipulation not only in totalitarian societies but in the self-deluding art-industrial complex that plunders the funds of taxpayers to create the conditions for elite conspicuous consumption and investment.

Manipulating the mental agenda to tinker with our perceptions is part of the problem and not part of the solution to an undoubted cultural degeneration where curatorship, criticism and production are all part of the politics of expectation designed to satisfy an impotent and anxious middle class.

Still, I am being a little too hard on this particular exhibition. Its intent was sincere and it has added to the sum of human knowledge. The criticism is only that it did not critique itself and its purpose and that it could not break free from current 'bourgeois expectation'.

[David Kintore · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the catalogue accompanying the Expressionists exhibition at Tate Modern in 2024, this is a wonderful book that captures the excitement of the pre-First World War years in and around Munich where the Blue Rider Expressionist artists lived and worked.

Kandinsky is the most famous member of the group but other artists such as Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, Marianne Werefkin, and August Macke are also covered.

It would be good to see a retrospective dedicated to Franz Marc at some point. Some of the best paintings in the exhibition and in this book are by him, such as ‘In the Rain’ (1912), ‘Doe in the Monastery Garden’ (1912), ‘Portrait of Maria Franck’ (1906), and ‘Tiger’ (1912).

[Deb Oestreicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful catalog of a terrific exhibit that was at Tate Modern. Excellent reproductions and very good, mostly brief, essays.