Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter grew out of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists' Association of Munich), a group Kandinsky had helped found in 1909. When the association's jury rejected one of Kandinsky's increasingly abstract paintings in 1911, he and Franz Marc resigned and quickly organized a rival exhibition under the name Der Blaue Reiter, held that December at the Moderne Galerie Thannhauser in Munich. A second, larger exhibition followed in early 1912, devoted mostly to works on paper and including artists such as Paul Klee, along with international contributors.

The group never adopted a formal manifesto or fixed roster; it functioned more as a loose editorial and exhibiting circle around Kandinsky and Marc. Its clearest statement of purpose was the Blaue Reiter Almanac, published in 1912, which juxtaposed reproductions of the artists' own work with folk art, children's drawings, medieval sculpture, and non-Western artifacts, implying that all these forms shared a common spiritual authenticity that academic training had lost. Kandinsky's treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," published the same year, laid out his belief that color and form could evoke states of the soul independent of subject matter.

Members and close associates included Kandinsky, Marc, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and, more loosely, Paul Klee. The circle exhibited alongside contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, absorbing ideas from French Fauvism and Cubism and Italian Futurism, which increasingly fractured Marc's and Macke's compositions between 1912 and 1914.

The movement ended almost as suddenly as it began. When World War I broke out in August 1914, Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, was forced to leave Germany; Macke was killed in action that September, and Marc died at Verdun in 1916. With its founders gone from Munich or dead, Der Blaue Reiter never reconstituted, though Kandinsky continued developing its ideas toward pure abstraction after the war, notably at the Bauhaus.

Painting in the Der Blaue Reiter Style Today

Palette: Start from saturated, non-naturalistic color assigned by feeling rather than observation—deep ultramarine or cobalt blue, crimson red, golden yellow, forest green. Choose a dominant color for symbolic weight (blue for calm or spirituality, red for intensity, yellow for warmth) before deciding what it will depict.

Composition: Build scenes around simplified, rounded forms—animals, hills, trees—interlocking like stained glass. Avoid deep, illusionistic perspective; let shapes overlap and nest within a shallow, decorative space. Curved, sweeping lines calm a composition; jagged, angular ones borrowed from Cubism and Futurism introduce tension.

Brushwork/technique: Apply paint in flat or lightly modulated planes rather than blended, academic shading. Outline forms with dark contour lines in the manner of Bavarian folk glass painting, then fill them with unmodulated color. Let color relationships—not tonal value—carry the composition's structure.

Subjects: Animals, especially horses and deer, are the movement's signature subject, chosen for their perceived purity. Landscapes, gardens, and everyday urban scenes are also characteristic. Avoid narrative literalism; use the subject as a vehicle for color and form, not as a record of appearances.

Practical tip: Work from memory or imagination once the basic subject is established, adjusting color and shape for expressive effect rather than accuracy. Studying Kandinsky's essay "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" reveals the group's own account of color's emotional associations.

Der Blaue Reiter's championing of color as an autonomous emotional force fed directly into the development of abstract art across twentieth-century Europe. Kandinsky carried its ideas forward at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, formalizing color theory and composition principles that shaped generations of design and art education. The group's insistence that children's drawings, folk art, and non-Western artifacts held aesthetic authority equal to academic painting anticipated later interest in vernacular and untrained art, and its cross-disciplinary Almanac—mixing painting, music, and ethnographic material—prefigured the multimedia ambitions of later avant-gardes.

Franz Marc's animal paintings remain some of the most reproduced images in German art, appearing widely on posters, book covers, and museum merchandise, and his saturated, symbolic use of color still shapes how illustrators and animators depict animals expressively rather than naturalistically. The group's short life and violent end—two of its central figures killed within the first years of World War I—also cemented it in cultural memory as emblematic of a lost pre-war idealism, a poignant marker of the moment European modernism turned from optimism toward catastrophe. Museums in Munich, above all the Lenbachhaus, continue to build their identity around the group's legacy.