Wonderful look at an extraordinary movement
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider Tate Modern, SE1 ★★★★★ Melanie McDonagh
THE Blue Rider is the name of a picture, a periodical and a movement, all centred on the intense, bespectacled figure of Wassily Kandinsky.
He painted one of the pictures with that title, edited the magazine, which ran to one edition and a touring show, and led the movement, which was broadly Expressionist. But really this exhibition is about the movement: a cosmopolitan group of friends and artists centred in Munich and Bavaria before the First World War.
They ranged in inspiration and subject matter from pure abstraction to figurative art; from traditional Catholic iconography to theosophy; and from colour theory to Shostakovich’s atonal scale.
With Kandinsky, you get the whole spectrum, from bold domestic interiors in bright colours to the explosive abstraction of Cossacks, 1910-11; from his theatrical poetry (roughly on the theme “there’s nobody there!”) to his engagement with Shostakovich — famously, he told him that what he was trying to do in music, he, Kandinsky, was attempting in art. In successive rooms we encounter both music and a mounted camera-spectrum through which we peer at Franz Marc’s Deer in Snow to see his use of the colour prism.
It was an international group: Russians, French, Germans, Jews of different nationalities and citizens of the Hapsburg Empire — the wall-panel authors tie themselves in knots trying to identify Kandinsky with the old Russian empire, the Finno-Ugric race, the old Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation — I think “Russian” might do it. But whereas the formative partnership within the Blue Rider is usually considered to be Kandinsky and Franz Marc, here Marc’s place is given to Gabriele Münter, a considerable female artist.
The group centred for a time on the Bavarian village of Murnau; I would give a lot to know what the locals made of them and especially Kandinsky’s take on a cow, a glorious play on colour with no obvious resemblance to a ruminant.
This is a wonderful exhibition, marred only by the Tate’s imposition of its fatuous preoccupations with gender and colonialism on the work of an extraordinary movement which, like so much else, was crushed in the Great War.