Between 1911 and 1914, an international collective of painters calling themselves Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) instigated “a revolution in modern art”, said Daria Hufnagel in The Independent.
Although based in Munich, the movement’s leading lights hailed from all around Europe and shared a belief that art could be used to express “personal experiences and spiritual ideas”: they used colour and compositional structure not to record objective reality, but to evoke mood and feeling. The group numbered several artists – including the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the German Franz Marc and the Swiss Paul Klee – who would be remembered as icons of modernism, plus many others who have since been “overlooked”.
Though they exhibited together just twice, their efforts paved the way towards abstraction and made an immense impact on the history of art. This new exhibition at Tate Modern charts the collective’s “remarkable” story, tracing its emergence, evolution and “lasting influence”.
Mixing masterpieces by the more famous expressionists with canvases by its less-remembered talents, it invites us to rediscover a “transnational” group whose work “remains compelling and relevant to this day”.
The show contains plenty of “ferociously glowing masterpieces”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Many of these come courtesy of Kandinsky, whose “incandescent” paintings are the clear highlight. The “turbulent, almost overwhelming” early abstract works he realised from 1912 “inundate the viewer with squirming, extra-terrestrial or microbial forms and fireballs”.
But his earlier, figurative work is captivating, too: a 1910 depiction of a cow, for instance, transforms its “boring, bovine” subject “into a mystical creature covered with yolky blotches”. Almost as good is another cow painting, by Franz Marc, of a “multicoloured, coruscating herd”. Sadly, however, the curators seem determined not to dwell on individual genius. Landmark canvases are relegated to side walls, and there are far too many that “I doubt anyone would miss”, by the likes of Albert Bloch.
The show strikes a rather “pious” tone, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. But it’s good that some less well-known expressionists are finally being given their due in this country. A case in point is Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’s pupil and, later, his lover. Her “mirthfully original” portrait of fellow artist Alexej Jawlensky imagines him as a “pink-faced” ellipse with “startled blue dots” for eyes; another likeness of Kandinsky himself sees the painter “holding forth” at a dinner table.
A wilder talent still is Marianne Werefkin, whose Alpine scene “The Red Tree” (1910) shivers with an “alien intensity”, and who paints herself with “eyes the lurid scarlet of some sci-fi monster”. This is a “rousing” exhibition of a seminal group of modern artists.
Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk). Until 20 October