In 1911, the expressionists Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky wrote in their programmatic publiciation aka the almanac The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter): “The whole work, called art, knows no borders and peoples, but humanity.” And in his 1912 book On the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky asserted: “Opposites and contradictions—that is our harmony.”
The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) existed from circa from 1911 until 1914 as one of the first transnational artist circles. The Lenbachhaus museum in Munich examines in its exhibition and homonymous catalogue Group Dynamics. The Blue Rider (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr) their art as a collaborative process.
The Blue Rider credo inspired the Lenbachhaus to consider the work of the participating artists—among them Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alfred Kubin, Maria Marc and Elisabeth Epstein—not only aesthetically and historically, but also in its intellectual, socio-economic, and political context, for the Blue Rider circle advocated a global, equal understanding of art, not only in words, but also through images and deeds.
The first Blue Rider show brought together participants and materials from various realms and eras: glass paintings alongside wood carvings, beside children’s drawings and masks from Cameroon, alongside scores of songs by Arnold Schoenberg. Though the leitmotif may have been protest against the academ icism prevalent at the time, the political impulse behind these assemblages was emancipatory: for example, women artists, whom academies were still forbidding to matriculate, were afforded exposure, as were folk art and art by children, whose creative wilfulness had been taken up by the progressive educational movement.
According to the Artistic Director of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes Hortensia Völckers and the institution’s Administrative Director Kirsten Hass, the present exhibition catalogue shows that the abolition of aesthetic boundaries had its limits: women who painted seem to have counted, for the Blue Rider, primarily as “natural talents,” with no standing of their own on the art market; children remained as anonymous as the peasants in the Russian provinces, remembered by Kandinsky mainly as “flecks of color on two legs.”
Caught up in the time of the colonial world order before World War I, however, The Blue Rider did not succeed in implementing an emancipatory practice of art beyond national affiliation and traditional hierarchies and genres. For the Lenbachhaus’ current exhibition catalogue, the idea of equal rights for all cultural production, as pursued in the almanac, is nevertheless fundamental.
For the first time, the many connections that the Blue Rider made to Japanese woodcuts, Bavarian and Russian folk art, children’s drawings, contemporary music, and art from Bali, Gabon, Polynesia, New Caledonia, Sri Lanka, and Mexico are presented in their entirety.
Hortensia Völckers and Kirsten Hass write in their “Word of Welcome”: In line with this contemporary subject, the Lenbachhaus is setting new benchmarks for interrogating its collection with this exhibition project, developing its facilities for outreach work, engaging diaspora groups in the civic community in museum work, and demonstrating that the “Group Dynamics” title has not simply been coined to denote the historical emergence of the Blue Rider, but can also can be understood as a positive self description of an institution in transition.
They underline that this research project is doubly radical. On the one hand it deals with the historical roots of the Blue Rider, whose works the Lenbachhaus can display in unmatched quality and quantity. On the other, the Lenbachhaus is espousing a new, globally oriented approach to the writing of art history—an approach beyond all allegiances to a Western system of art, and one that casts new light on those alternative avantgardes we have yet to encounter outside the canon and the continent of Europe.
The artists’ engagement with a multiplicity of ethnographica—from Benin bronzes to Chinese painting—
was also molded by that “exclusive inclusivity” (as Susanne Leeb terms it) of the perspective engendered by colonial rule, in which on the one hand the “primitive” assumed an aura, while on the other the historical idiosyncracies and contemporaneity of its producers bear hardly any weight.
The richly illustrated catalogue offers contributions by specialists on subjects such as: the sites of Murnau, Sindelsdorf and Tegernsee, which inspired members of The Blue Rider; the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM); the specific spiritual approach to art of the Blue Rider, as for instance expressed in Kandinsky’s 1912 book On the Spiritual in Art; detailed information on The First and The Second Exhibition of the Editorial Board of the Blue Rider; the images of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter from different fields and epochs of art; east asian woodblock prints and drawings; exoticism; reverse glass paintings (Hinterglasmalerei); folk art; escapism; children’s worlds—for instance, between 1908 and around 1914, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky assembled a collection of over 250 children’s drawings and paintings, still preserved in the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation; the interest in contemporary music of the arists associated with the Blue Rider.
In addition, the present catalogue contains reproductions of all works exhibited in 2021 as well as (tiny) reprints of the catalogues of the First, Second, and Third NKVM exhibitions 1909–12 and reprints of the catalogues of The First and the Second Exhibitions of the Editorial Board of The Blue Rider 1911/12.
The present project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation as part of the Museum Global program. It will be followed in the fall of 2021 by a second exhibition, Group Dynamics— Collectives of Modernity, dedicated to groups of artists working worldwide. This catalogue is also published by Hatje Cantz.
Because of the covid19-pandemic, check the Lenbachaus website for the exact dates of the two Munich exhibitions Group dynamics—The Blue Rider and Group dynamics—Collectives of Modernity.
The catalogue, edited by Matthias Mühling, Annegret Hoberg, Anna Straetmans, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau München: Group Dynamics. The Blue Rider. With texts by Annegret Hoberg, Matthias Mühling, Anna Straetmans, graphic design by magma design studio. English catalogue, hardcover, 2021, 446 pages with 605 illustrations, 20.00 x 27.00 cm, ISBN 978-3-7757-4841-4. Order the English book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr. Order the German edition/Deutsche Ausgabe Gruppendynamik. Der Blaue Reiter from Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review are not put between quotation marks.
Book review of Group Dynamics. The Blue Rider added September 1, 2021 at 12:46 German time.
