Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a German Expressionist group that formed in Munich around 1911 around the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Its name came from the almanac they published in 1912 and, according to legend, from the founders' shared love of horses, riders and the colour blue, which they associated with spirituality. Unlike the harsh, angular aesthetic of the Dresden group Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter favoured a lyrical, mystical and increasingly abstract art in which colour and form were meant to express inner, spiritual realities. The circle included August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Its members were fascinated by folk art, children's drawings, and medieval and non-European traditions, which they saw as possessing a sincerity lost to academic art. Kandinsky's treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art provided the movement's theoretical foundation. The group dissolved with the outbreak of the First World War, in which both Marc and Macke were killed, yet it remained a decisive step towards abstract painting.