DER BLAUE REITER


Der Blaue Reiter was a German Expressionist movement that was established in December 1911 by Kandinsky, Marc and Gabriele Münter.

Painters Kandinsky and Marc worked on an almanac in which they showed their artistic conceptions. The title of the almanac, which then became the name of the group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), came from the painting by Kandinsky. His Blaue Reiter ( Blue Rider ) was an adventure in the simplification and stylization of forms and the connection between music and painting.

The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms had equivalence with sounds and music, and sought to create color harmonies which would be purifying to the soul. Although in this very earliest works, the impressionistic influence was recognizable, the artists who took part in The Blue Rider were considered to be the pioneers of abstract art or abstract expressionism. Their work promoted individual expression and broke free from any artistic restraints. These Nietzsche's words sum up the group's motto, "Who wishes to be creative must first blast and destroy accepted values."

The first exhibitions of The Blue Rider included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, and Arnold Schönberg. These artists, who early in their careers broke from the mainstream, were later to become the driving force behind modern art as we know it today.

KANDINSKY





The Russian painter and graphic artist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the great masters of modern art, as well as the outstanding representative of pure abstract painting (using only colors and forms) that dominated the first half of the twentieth century.  

Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 4, 1866, in Moscow, Russia. His father was a tea merchant. When he was five years old the family moved to Odessa, Russia. The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and the cello. Because his family was fond of traveling, Kandinsky got to see the Italian cities of Venice, Rome, and Florence as a young boy. He was also influenced by the imposing Muscovite (from Moscow) buildings such as the Kremlin.
Between 1886 and 1892 Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. In 1889 he was a member of a team formed to study the life of the people in the Vologda district in northwestern Russia. He was highly impressed by their folk art and the interior decorations of the village houses. The use of forms and colors became an influence in his art. In 1893 he accepted a position on the university's law faculty.     

It was not until 1896, when Kandinsky was thirty years old, that he decided to become an artist. His artistic development was shaped greatly by an exhibition of French impressionist painters that was shown in Moscow in 1895. The impressionists used values of color and light to show their subjects rather than painting in fine detail. The works of Claude Monet (1840–1926) attracted Kandinsky's attention. In Monet's paintings the subject matter played a secondary role to color. It was as though reality and fairy tale were intermixed. That was the secret of Kandinsky's early work, which was based on folk art, and it remained so even as his work became more complex.
The year 1910 was crucial for Kandinsky and for the art world. Kandinsky produced his first abstract watercolor. In that work all elements of representation (the actual look of a subject) seem to have disappeared. In continuing his early abstract works he used strong straight-line strokes combined with powerful patches of color.