Der Blaue Reiter Der Blaue Reiter—the Blue Rider—formed in Munich around the painters Vasily Kandinsky (a Russian from Moscow) and Franz Marc (Munich) who both considered blue the color of spirituality. The first exhibition was in 1911. Remember, Gauguin’s Yellow Christ 1889

Franz Marc One of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter—the Blue Rider. Franz’s work was influenced by the Fauves (Derain, de Vlaminck, and Matisse). The Fauves were a group of artists who had been derisively described as “wildbeasts”—fauves—who exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne (fall salon). The critic rejected their explosive colors and impulsive brushwork. Marc primarily painted animals, because he felt that they have a more spiritual relationship to nature than humans do. Marc was on a list of notable artists to be withdrawn from combat in WWI. Before the orders were carried out, he was struck in the head and killed instantly by a shell splinter during the Battle of Verdun (1916).

Franz Marc The Yellow Cow 1911

Franz Marc The Large Blue Horses 1911

Franz Marc Blue-Black Fox 1911

Franz Marc Deer in the Woods II 1912

Franz Marc The Fate of the Animals 1913

Franz Marc Fighting Forms 1914

Vasily Kandinsky One of the founders of Der Blaue Reiter Kandinsky hoped to awaken spirituality and to inaugurate “a great spiritual epoch” through the sheer force of color. He is considered the very first artist to paint completely abstract works of art. The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the most significant artists of the early twentieth century, and a pioneer in the development of a new visual language - abstraction. Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction focuses on the early, exploratory period of his career, as he moved from early observations of landscape towards fully abstract compositions. Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, the son of a wealthy tea merchant. He studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, and taught in the law faculty. It was not until 1896 that he decided to become an artist, prompted by two revelatory experiences. When he saw one of the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s paintings of haystacks at an exhibition in Moscow, Kandinsky was stirred by the colour and composition of the work, which he realised was far more important than its depiction of a physical landscape. The other experience was a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. Music influenced Kandinsky’s art profoundly: he admired the way it could elicit an emotional response, without being tied to a recognisable subject matter. Painting, he believed, should aspire to be as abstract as music, with groups of colour in a picture relating to one another in a manner analogous to sequences of chords in music.

Vasily Kandinsky Der Blaue Reiter 1903

Vasily Kandinsky Ludwigskirche in Munich 1908 Wassily Kandinsky,Ludwigskirche in Munich 1908 Vasily Kandinsky Ludwigskirche in Munich 1908

Vasily Kandinsky Landscape with Factory Chimney 1910 Wassily Kandinsky,Ludwigskirche in Munich 1908 Vasily Kandinsky Landscape with Factory Chimney 1910

Vasily Kandinsky Composition V 1911 In his seminal treatise On the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, Kandinsky separated his paintings into three categories. ‘Impressions’ were observations of the natural world. ‘Improvisations’ were spontaneous expressions of a mood or feeling, such as Improvisation 11 (1910) displayed here. ‘Compositions’ were also inner visions, but on a grander, more ambitious scale. The meticulous planning and intricate structure of the Compositions made them analogous to a symphony. Soon after creating his first Composition, Kandinsky became immersed in the new musical theories of the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he began a longstanding friendship and correspondence. The development of Kandinsky’s art, as he moved towards abstraction, relates to Schoenberg’s innovations in musical composition.   Vasily Kandinsky Composition V 1911

Vasily Kandinsky Composition VII 1913 Composition VII and the closely related Composition VI, in the next room, were painted in quick succession in 1913. His two largest paintings, they embody his complex philosophical and pictorial ideas of that time. Composition VII was the result of two months of preliminary work: Kandinsky made more studies for this composition than for any other – over thirty drawings, watercolours and sketches. However, according to Gabriele Münter, the final version was painted in just three days. Münter took four photographs of the painting at critical stages of its evolution. These, together with the many studies, give an insight into Kandinsky’s working methods and underlying vision. While the final painting appears to be totally non-figurative, the photographs and studies, together with Kandinsky’s own writings, suggest apocalyptic themes of Deluge, Last Judgement, Resurrection and Paradise. It is possible to detect recognisable motifs, such as the boat and oars in the lower left corner, but Kandinsky has deliberately veiled these external, representational elements in favour of the internal, spiritual meaning. Vasily Kandinsky Composition VII 1913

Vasily Kandinsky Fragment 2 for Composition VII 1913

Vasily Kandinsky Improvisation No. 30 1913 Improvisation 30 (Cannons) (1913) evokes the imagery of war. Whilst placing increasing emphasis on lines, shapes and colours to convey emotion, Kandinsky still uses recognisable elements, such as cannons, a castle and a crowd of figures. Although Kandinsky admitted that it was probably the perpetual talk of war that led him to include the cannons, he went on to explain that the painting was not intended as a literal representation. Instead, he said, the recognisable elements in the painting were expressions of what the spectator feels while looking at the painting.

Vasily Kandinsky Blue Segment 1921 Blue Segment (1921), with its combination of different forms, shows Kandinsky’s art at a pivotal moment. Like many of his earlier works, the title focuses on just one section of the painting, in this case the blue segment rather like a crescent moon. The floating, freeform elements of the painting contrast with more hard-edged geometrical shapes – circles, triangles and rectangles. The colours are more muted, prefiguring his later work, when he was to move away from primary colours and explore a wider range of shades.

Alexander Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture by making movement one of its main components. Yet his invention of the "mobile" -- a word coined in 1931 by artist Marcel Duchamp to designate Calder's moving sculpture -- was only one of Calder's achievements. In his early wire figures and in his "stabiles," static sculptures in sheet metal, Calder created innovative works by exploring the aesthetic possibilities of untraditional materials. As a major contribution to the development of abstract art, Calder's stabiles and mobiles challenged the prevailing notion of sculpture as a composition of masses and volumes by proposing a new definition based on the ideas of open space and transparency. With the giant stabiles of the latter part of his career, Calder launched a new type of public sculpture -- one which proved so successful that many of these works have become landmarks in cities around the globe. Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI5PRaTSMUI

Paul Klee

Paul Klee Hammamet with Its Mosque 1914 Klee's artistic training, which began in 1898, when he went to Munich for three years to learn to draw and paint, can be said to have lasted until 1914, when he visited Tunisia. The light of North Africa aroused in him a sense of color, and there Klee made his now-famous statement: "Color and I are one. I am a painter." On April 14, 1914, Klee visited Hammamet, a small town on the Mediterranean northwest of Tunis. He captured a view of the city in Hammamet with Its Mosque, a watercolor painted from outside the city walls. As happens so often in Klee's works, the picture consists of representational as well as nonrepresentational elements. The upper part shows the mosque surrounded by two towers and gardens; the lower area is made up of translucent color planes, following Robert Delaunay's (1885–1941) example of making pure color and its contrasts the sole subject of a picture.

Paul Klee Introducing the Miracle 1916

Paul Klee Red Balloon 1922 Paul Klee’s persistent shifts in style, technique, and subject matter indicate a deliberate and highly playful evasion of aesthetic categorization. Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible to confuse a work by Klee with one by any other artist, even though many have emulated his idiosyncratic, enigmatic art. So accepted was his work that Klee was embraced over the years by the Blue Rider group, the European Dada contingent, the Surrealists, and the Bauhaus faculty, with whom he taught for a decade in Weimar and Dessau. As part of the early 20th-century avant-garde, Klee formulated a personal abstract pictorial language. His vocabulary, which oscillates freely between the figurative and the nonrepresentational, communicates through a unique symbology that is more expressive than descriptive. Klee conveyed his meanings through an often whimsical fusion of form and text, frequently writing the titles to his works on the mats upon which they are mounted and including words within the images themselves. Such is the case with The Bavarian Don Giovanni, in which Klee indicated his admiration for the Mozart opera as well as for certain contemporary sopranos, while hinting at his own amorous pursuits. A veiled self-portrait, the figure climbing the ladder is surrounded by five women’s names, an allusion to the operatic scene in which Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello recites a list of his master’s 2,065 love affairs. Citing Klee’s confession that his “infatuations changed with every soubrette at the opera,” art historian K. Porter Aichele has identified the Emma and Thères of the watercolor as the singers Emma Carelli and Thérèse Rothauser. The others—Cenzl, Kathi, and Mari—refer to models with whom Klee had fleeting romantic interludes. Although much of Klee’s work is figurative, compositional design nearly always preceded narrative association. The artist often transformed his experiments in tonal value and line into visual anecdotes. Red Balloon, for example, is at once a cluster of delicately colored, floating geometric shapes and a charming cityscape. Runner at the Goal is an essay in simultaneity; overlapping and partially translucent bars of color illustrate the consecutive gestures of a figure in motion. The flailing arms and sprinting legs add a comic touch to this figure, on whose forehead the number “one” promises a winning finish. Nancy Spector

Klee was one of the many modernist artists who wanted to practice what he called "the pure cultivation of the means" of painting—in other words, to use line, shape, and color for their own sake rather than to describe something visible. That priority freed him to create images dealing less with perception than with thought, so that the bird in this picture seems to fly not in front of the cat's forehead but inside it–the bird is literally on the cat's mind. Stressing this point by making the cat all head, Klee concentrates on thought, fantasy, appetite, the hungers of the brain. One of his aims as an artist, he said, was to "make secret visions visible." The cat is watchful, frighteningly so, but it is also calm, and Klee's palette too is calm, in a narrow range from tawny to rose with zones of bluish green. This and the suggestion of a child's drawing lighten the air. Believing that children were close to the sources of creativity, Klee was fascinated by their art, and evokes it here through simple lines and shapes: ovals for the cat's eyes and pupils (and, more loosely, for the bird's body), triangles for its ears and nose. And the tip of that nose is a red heart, a sign of the cat's desire. Paul Klee Cat and Bird 1928

Paul Klee The One Who Understands 1934 When the National Socialists declared his art "degenerate" in 1933, Klee returned to his native Bern. He had spent the previous twenty-seven years studying, working, and teaching in Germany. Now in Bern, Klee lived in a small three-room apartment on the outskirts of town. He was internationally known, yet he had no following in Switzerland. He sold little and was supported only by a small group of faithful friends. Austere and pensive, The One Who Understands is a fine example of the artist's later style. That style consists here in the image's larger scale, simple design, and patches of white, rust, and beige in the areas of unprimed canvas that Klee left untouched. The painting belongs to a group of some thirteen works from 1933–34, mostly drawings, that evoke the schematic diagrams of the human cranium found in medical textbooks.

Paul Klee New Harmony 1936