Like many of the avant-garde groups that broke away from existing institutions in the early years of the twentieth century, the circle of modernist painters that came to be known as the Blue Rider in Munich in 1911 owed its existence to a quarrel with authority. In the case of the Blue Rider painters, however, the quarrel was not with a benighted academy but with another artists’ group—the New Artists Association of Munich—that had been founded only two years earlier, in 1909, to foster the fortunes of the avant-garde. No less a modernist firebrand than the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky had been elected president of the New Artists group, yet this did not prevent the chairman of its exhibition committee from summarily rejecting a large abstract painting by Kandinsky—his Composition V (1911)—that had been submitted to the Association’s third exhibition in 1911. Kandinsky’s newly emergent art of abstraction proved to be too radical even for the “advanced” standards of the New Artists Association.

It was this rejection that prompted Kandinsky to resign his presidency and organize the Blue Rider as an alternative avant-garde, and in this endeavor he was joined by two German painters—Gabriele Münter and Franz Marc—who had also been members of the New Artist Association. They were soon joined by two other Russians—Alexei von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. None but Kandinsky was an abstractionist, yet they nonetheless looked upon Kandinsky as their leader, and it is one of the curiosities of Blue Rider history, which has long been associated with the birth of abstraction, that Kandinsky remained the only dedicated abstractionist in the group. So swiftly did this imbroglio in the ranks of the Munich avant-garde unfold that the first Blue Rider exhibition opened on the same day and in the same space—the Moderne Galerie Tannhauser—where the last exhibition of the New Artists Association closed.

It has to be remembered that in the early decades of the twentieth century virtually all of the world’s established museums were firmly closed to modernist endeavors. Artists of this controversial persuasion were thus obliged to organize their own exhibitions. In the German-speaking art world, these artists were often called Secessionists; in France, and subsequently in the United States, they called themselves Independents. Some of these exhibitions were mounted on a huge scale. This was the period in which Roger Fry and his Bloomsbury friends organized the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London, in 1910, and a similar group of American artists and critics—among them, Robert Henri, Walter Pach, Walt Kuhn, and Arthur B. Davies—organized the Armory Show in New York in 1913. The latter, in turn, was much influenced by the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, which the Americans took as their model.

While the two exhibitions organized by the Blue Rider—Munich 1911, Berlin 1912—were far more modest in scale, they were similarly conceived to embrace an international avant-garde. In the first, the School of Paris was represented by Robert Delaunay and the revered but already deceased Henri Rousseau, and the Russian avant-garde by the Burliuk brothers as well as Kandinsky, who published his manifesto in defense of abstract painting, On the Spiritual in Art, at the same time. The American avant-garde was represented, somewhat lamely, by a single painter, Albert Bloch, who is mainly remembered today, to the extent that he is remembered at all, for his brief association with the Blue Rider group. The 1912 show in Berlin added Picasso, Braque, Vlaminck, and Klee to the Blue Rider’s roster, but by then the Blue Rider was already unraveling as a distinct group, and the outbreak of the first World War, in which both Franz Marc and August Macke perished in combat, brought its short-lived history to a close. Kandinsky, who had given the group its name with his drawing of a blue rider on horseback for the cover of the Blue Rider Almanac, remained its one and only major artist.

It is another of the curiosities that marked the Blue Rider’s brief existence that its first exhibition had included some paintings by the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg. This was done mainly at the behest of Kandinsky, who had a keen interest in modern music and devoted the closing paragraphs of On the Spiritual in Art to a discussion of it, placing Schoenberg’s use of dissonance in the context of the innovations of Wagner, Moussorgsky, Debussy, and Scriabin, and by implication equating Schoenberg’s dissonant aesthetic with his own venture into the aesthetics of abstraction. Indeed, what Kandinsky said of Schoenberg’s achievement in music—that he “has already discovered mines of new beauty in his search for spiritual structure”—simply repeated Kandinsky’s claims for his own achievement in painting.

Whether or not it is intellectually legitimate to insist upon the existence of some vaguely defined “spiritual structure” that can be said to unite atonal music and abstract painting is a question I shall leave to the music critics to determine. As a practical matter, however, it is clearly something that Kandinsky firmly believed, and it was on that basis that Schoenberg was invited to exhibit his paintings with the Blue Rider group. It didn’t seem to matter that as a painter Schoenberg was hardly in the same league as the other Blue Rider painters. As a modernist painter, he was in fact an amateur. It was only in his more conventional portraits and self-portraits that Schoenberg succeeded in attaining what may be called a professional level in pictorial art, but these pictures have little, if any, aesthetic kinship with Kandinsky’s abstractions or with avant-garde art of any persuasion.

If there were ever any doubts about this, they have been definitely put to rest in the exhibition that has lately been organized in “Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider” at the Jewish Museum in New York.[1] To state the matter as politely as possible, this is a very odd exhibition. Not surprisingly, its principal strength is to be found in its selection of Kandinsky’s early abstract expressionist paintings, among them the splendid Impression III (Concert) (1911), which he produced as a tribute to Schoenberg upon hearing the latter’s music for the first time. But except for the eleven Kandinskys, the representation of the rest of the Blue Rider circle is rather patchy, with only two important paintings by Franz Marc and only one by August Macke. There is also a single picture by Albert Bloch, some good examples of Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’s companion at the time, whose delicate landscapes and genre scenes are lovely but modest in ambition, and four examples of Jawlensky’s Germano-Russian Fauve pictures.

But then, there are the Schoenberg pictures, thirty-six of them, which effectively capsize the exhibition, reducing the show’s high-art pretensions to the level of an historical documentary. It doesn’t help, either, that visitors to the exhibition are invited to listen to audio tapes of Schoenberg’s music while studying the paintings, or that there is a CD of some Schoenberg performances tucked into the hard-cover copies of the show’s elaborate catalogue. It adds nothing to our appreciation of Schoenberg’s music, which requires close concentration, to hear it performed in the presence of his amateur pictorial efforts. No doubt the organizers of “Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider” meant well, but this show is the kind of experiment that should not be repeated.

Notes
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1. “Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider” opened at The Jewish Museum, New York, on October 24, 2003 and remains on view through February 12, 2004. A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Esther da Coseta Meyer and Fred Wasserman, has been published by Scala Books (208 pages, $39.95). Go back to the text.