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This chapter explores the rich mixture of ideas, debates, influences and sources that contributed to the way Expressionism developed in Germany. It also introduces the two key groups of pre-war Expressionism; Die Brücke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich.

Art in late nineteenth-century Wilhelmine Germany was dominated by professional institutions, such as the Academy, and by artistic conventions, such as the emphasis on historical and literary subjects as those most worthy for public exhibition. The mixture of intricate realism, patriotism and cosy sentimentality in Anton von Werner’s Im Etappenquartier vor Paris (In a Billet outside Paris) exemplifies well “official” taste in the 1890s. As soon as it had been completed, it was bought for the Nationalgalerie. The painting shows a comradely group of soldiers relaxing to the strains of a Lied by Schumann, Das Meer erglänzte weit hinaus, played and sung by two lancers. The setting is a requisitioned chateau just outside Versailles during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Their bluff manliness – all muddy boots and ruddy cheeks – and wholesome love of German Kultur is very deliberately contrasted with the effete rococo fussiness of French Zivilisation in their surroundings. Von Werner was director of the Berlin Academy and the most powerful figure in the institutional German art world at the time. He was also the favourite of Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself notoriously opinionated, conservative and outspoken in his views on art.

All the more shocking, then, was the work sprung on an unsuspecting public at the newly-opened headquarters of the conservative Verein Berliner Künstler (Union of Berlin Artists) in 1892. It was by a Norwegian artist then still unknown in Germany, but who would inspire many Expressionists in the decades to follow – Edvard Munch. He had been invited to exhibit and arrived with fifty-five works, including one or more versions of The Kiss. This image re-surfaced many times in Munch’s oeuvre. For him, it was tied up with the idea of the destructiveness of passion. He meant this not in terms of its potential for social disgrace, but more profoundly: a woman’s passion had the power to enslave men, arouse jealousy and – here almost literally – eat into the strength of the individual. When Erich Heckel met Munch in 1907, Munch offered the young German artist his Strindbergian view of women: “Das Weib ist wie Feuer, wärmend und verzehrend”. (“Woman is like fire, warming and consuming”.) If we try to imagine the effect images like Munch’s had on the conservative “establishment”, we can also understand something of the sexual insecurities of the age. Critics scorned Munch’s pallid colours, likening them to a housepainter’s undercoat. But more than considerations of technique, it was the subjects of Munch’s work that offended conservative sensibilities. The writer, friend and biographer of Munch, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, articulated the most unsettling aspect of The Kiss when he noted of the figures that:

“We see two human figures, each of the two faces melting into the other. Not a single recognisable facial feature remains: all we see is that point where they melt, a point that looks like a huge ear, rendered deaf by the ecstasy of the blood. It looks like a pool of molten flesh: there’s something hideous in it”.

To the cultured men of the Verein, with their taste for heroic battle scenes and history painting, The Kiss, along with Munch’s other deeply introspective syntheses of the taboos of sex, death and intense emotion, were anathema. Add to this the howls of protest from the press and it is no surprise that the exhibition was closed after just one week. Paradoxically, the scandal did more for Munch’s career than any other event. In fact, it made his name in Berlin almost overnight. Munch wrote a letter home from Berlin to Norway:

“I could hardly have received better advertising… People came long distances to see the exhibition… I’ve never had such enjoyable days. It’s incredible that anything as innocent as art can create such furore. You asked me whether it has made me nervous. I’ve gained six pounds and have never felt better”.

The incident had far-reaching ramifications. It caused a rift between liberal and conservative members of the Verein that ultimately led to the foundation of the more progressive Berlin Secession. A decade later, Munch was to become a rich source of inspiration for Expressionist artists as they explored ways of giving form to subjective perception and emotional states, rather than mimesis and anecdote.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two of Germany’s most distinctive and original artists were women: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz had a long, prolific career that lasted from the 1890s until her death – just days before the end of the Second World War – well after Expressionism’s demise. Like Munch, her work often deals with profound emotion, birth, suffering and death. But it is otherwise very different. His work emerged from a Symbolist, bohemian milieu, pungent with sex and decadence on the one hand, and a highly personal, subjective sensitivity to the natural sublime on the other. Hers came from a Realist tradition of humane socio-political engagement and fundamental philanthropy. Kollwitz was primarily a graphic artist, making works on paper ranging from brief, gestural drawings to numerous versions of intricate etchings, finely tuned to the effects of subtle tonal variations.

Unlike Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker died young, before “Expressionism” even came into common parlance. Groups like the Brücke in their early phases knew little or nothing of her work. Emil Nolde met her in Paris in 1900, but this was before she had developed the style on which her posthumous reputation came to rest. Nonetheless, she is an interesting precursor of Expressionism.

As a woman artist, Modersohn-Becker was not admitted to the traditional Academy. She trained instead at a single-sex school in Berlin and then at the Colarossi Academy in Paris. Her work was greatly stimulated by her first-hand experience of art in the French capital, above all by Cézanne, Gauguin, Rodin and collections of Japanese art. However, her most powerful subject-matter was drawn from the German provincial countryside. She joined the established artists’ colony at Worpswede, a small village in the marshy, moorland landscape near Bremen in the north of Germany in 1898. In so doing, she was taking part in a growing tradition of creative retreats into the countryside. Other established artists’ colonies included Pont-Aven in France and St Ives in Britain. “Going away” appealed to artists in search of uncorrupted nature, colourful indigenous traditions and close-knit community.

Edvard Munch, The Kiss, 1897.

Oil on canvas, 99 x 80.5 cm.

Munch-museet, Oslo.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Trumpeting Girl, 1903. Oil on canvas.

Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße,

Paula Modersohn – Becker Museum, Bremen.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Old Woman in Garden, 1907. Oil on canvas.

Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße,

Paula Modersohn – Becker Museum, Bremen.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, After the Bath, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 84 x 95 cm.

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

In short, what many were seeking was life untouched by the ruptures of capitalist modernity. In fact, such artists’ colonies were themselves products of the railway age, the tastes of urban art markets and modern, exoticising fantasies about the folk cultures of distant provinces. In the case of Modersohn-Becker, the landscape, local inhabitants and fellow artists at the Worpswede colony provided her with conditions in which she was able to develop a highly personal style. Her monumental portrait of an old woman from the local poorhouse is remarkable for the strong sense of design, semi-abstract forms, and the finely tuned evocation of the shadows and fading glow of the Northern twilight. Even more striking is the sense of powerful, dignified human presence with which she has endowed the old woman.

Modersohn-Becker was often ambivalent about the Worpswede life and felt a lack of stimulation there. She married another Worpswede artist, Otto Modersohn, but her antidote to the colony’s insularity was Paris (which she called the “world”). She was a sophisticated artist, but in her drive for directness and truthfulness, she avoided sentimentalising or romanticising her subjects. This is part of what distinguishes her work from that of artists who went into the countryside looking for subjects to match their own or their collectors’ received ideas of the countryside. She died in 1907, aged thirty-one, a few weeks after giving birth to a daughter.

Another member of the Worpswede colony and a close friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, dedicated a requiem, full of images of life and fertility, to her:

The tension between cosmopolitan modernity and indigenous nature was an important political factor in debates around Germany’s artistic heritage and future. The concept of “German Art” was controversial before, during, and after the era of Expressionism. But it was an especially contested issue in Wilhelmine Germany – from unification in 1871 until the empire’s collapse in 1918.

At that time, discussion of modern art was often tied to concerns for German national identity. Julius Langbehn’s nationalist Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator), published in 1890, became an instant best-seller. Langbehn had no qualms about defining Rembrandt as German, who, along with Goethe and Luther, constituted the “culture” that would be “the true salvation of the Germans”. His book diagnosed contemporary Germany as a culture in decline, threatened on all sides by internationalism, science, democracy – in short, by modernity. The nationalist cant of anti-modernism was taken up in the following decades by, amongst others, Carl Vinnen, a conservative painter of landscapes, also from Worpswede. He published an inflammatory collection of texts, signed by 118 artists, under the title Ein Protest deutscher Künstler (A Protest of German Artists) in 1911. Vinnen had become embittered at the purchase by the museum in Bremen of an expensive landscape by Van Gogh. In spite of his Dutch roots, Van Gogh was equated with what Vinnen saw as the “great invasion of French art”. Furthermore, “French art” soon came to stand for modernism in general, including Expressionism.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with Camellia, 1906–1907.

Oil on wood, 61 x 30.5 cm.

Museum Folkwang, Essen.

An ardent defence, in the form of a published counter-statement Im Kampf um die Kunst (The Struggle for Art) was quickly mounted by the pro-modernist camp: progressive artists, writers and collectors. They included the art historian Wilhelm Worringer, members of the emerging Blaue Reiter circle and Max Beckmann. Although Expressionist art itself was often quite strikingly apolitical, this early conflict in its history highlighted the cultural-political dimension of the issue of Expressionism in the German context. This became especially clear in the 1930s when theorists on the Left debated retrospectively the successes and failures of Expressionism, and the campaign against modernism, internationalism and Expressionism re-ignited with greater violence in the form of the National Socialists’ campaign against so-called Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art).

What became Expressionism, in the sense it has now, first began to emerge just a few years into the new century. In Dresden, a group of young architecture students at the city’s Technical University began meeting to read, discuss and work together in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s student lodgings. Dissatisfied with conventional academic art training, they organised informal life-drawing sessions using a young model, with short poses that they were only able to capture in quick, decisive, “courageous” lines, as one of them, Fritz Bleyl, put it. This way of working liberated them from the academic practices of drawing meticulously from a model in stiff, eternal poses, working from dirty old plaster casts, or copying slavishly from the Old Masters. By 1905, they decided to formalise their independent group, chiefly for exhibition purposes. They drew, painted and made prints, first in an improvised studio space organised by Erich Heckel – it was an attic in his parents’ house in the Friedrichstadt district – and later in a series of other studios in the neighbourhood.

An important early statement of intent came in 1906. In the catalogue to their first group exhibition, held in Löbtau, Dresden, they issued their rallying cry. This was in the form of a founding “manifesto” of the Künstlergruppe Brücke (Bridge Artists’ Group). Printed in stylised, quasi-primitive lettering, the text reads:

WITH FAITH IN DEVELOPMENT AND IN A NEW GENERATION OF CREATORS AND APPRECIATORS, WE CALL TOGETHER ALL YOUTH. AS YOUTH, WE CARRY THE FUTURE AND WANT TO CREATE FOR OURSELVES FREEDOM OF LIFE AND OF MOVEMENT AGAINST THE LONG-ESTABLISHED OLDER FORCES. EVERYONE WHO WITH IMMEDIACY AND AUTHENTICITY CONVEYS THAT WHICH DRIVES HIM TO CREATE, BELONGS WITH US.

The “drive” to create came from the core members of the Brücke group: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. Bleyl left the group in 1907 to pursue a career in architectural design. Max Pechstein and the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet joined in 1906. Upon invitation, Emil Nolde, an older artist, became a member for a short while (1906–1907) and later they were joined by Otto Mueller.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dodo and Her Brother, 1908–1920.

Oil on canvas, 170.5 x 95 cm.

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton.

Wassily Kandinsky, Sketch for the cover of the Blaue Reiter almanach, 1911.

Watercolour, 28 x 20.5 cm.

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

The woodcut medium was central to the Brücke from an early stage. In painting, although there were differences between individual artists’ work, the early canvases are often characterised by intense, non-naturalistic colouring and loose, broken brushwork. They reveal a lively engagement with recent art in Europe. Kirchner, Heckel and others absorbed and worked through the implications of modern international art; of French postimpressionism – Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh – and, a little later, of Matisse and Munch. These artists’ work could be seen in numerous exhibitions across Germany at the time. It was widely documented and debated in the art press and in influential books such as Julius Meier-Graefe’s monumental Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (History of the Development of Modern Art), published in 1904.

Jugendstil, the turn-of-the-century reform movement in the decorative arts, also made an impact on the Brücke in its infancy. The sinuous contours of the Jugendstil aesthetic appear in some early Brücke prints. More fundamental principles of the movement, such as the desire to renew the arts and break down traditional barriers between the fine and applied arts, are also echoed in some of the ideals of the emerging Expressionist movement.

Like many avant-garde artists across Europe, the Brücke discovered a new world of form, materials, imagery and symbolism in the art of non-western cultures. Their imaginative response to African and Oceanic cultures was part of the wider phenomenon of “primitivism”, often rooted in Western exoticising fantasies. But in the German Expressionist context, this was also part of a search for collective “origins”, going back to the elusive “essence” of human creativity. Many of the idealised notions of directness, instinctiveness and authenticity at the core of Expressionist ideology are related to the Brücke’s and other Expressionists’ interest in the traces of “primitive” cultures reproduced through the media of ethnography.

In an interesting variant on the Expressionist search for “authentic” origins, Mueller was drawn to the gypsy communities of Eastern Europe, travelling to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in the 1920s to paint and study them. He often painted his subjects using tempera on rough canvas, giving his works a “dry” and deliberately unpolished quality. Mueller seems to have felt a strong personal affinity with the gypsies he painted – his mother came from a gypsy family, but had been abandoned as a child.

Finally, Expressionism involved a unique and complex confrontation with another powerful source; that of the German artistic past. There is an intricate connection between German Expressionism and the art of the Middle Ages. In some ways, the Expressionists’ “rediscovery” of the medieval Gothic was related to the wider primitivist project – the search for what they imagined as “pure”, authentic, vital art. For many, the art of the Middle Ages possessed a powerful integrity. Its handcraft traditions and expressive, non-naturalistic forms, resonant of profound piety, were understood as the product of an intuitive tradition.

Emil Nolde, whose own politics tended towards the völkisch-nationalist, responded passionately to the art of so-called “primitive” peoples, or Urvölker, but, in keeping with Expressionism’s anti-academic stance, he was dismissive of art-historical orthodoxy. Ironically, the history of “great art” that he takes issue with was the legacy of a Prussian: the antiquarian and “father of art history”, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). An early draft of a book on tribal art that Nolde wanted to publish began:

“1. ‘We see the highest art in the Greeks. In painting, Raphael is the greatest of all Masters.’ This was what every art pedagogue taught twenty or thirty years ago.

“2. Some things have changed since then. We don’t like Raphael and the sculptures of the so-called flowering of Greek art leave us cold. Our predecessors’ ideals are no longer ours. We like less the works under which great names have stood for centuries. Sophisticated artists in the hustle and bustle of their times made art for Popes and palaces. We value and love the unassuming people who worked in their workshops, of whom we barely know anything today, for their simple and largely-hewn sculptures in the cathedrals of Naumburg, Magdeburg, Bamberg”.

In the spirit of the German Romantics of the early nineteenth century, many of the Expressionist generation felt cut off from the spiritual traditions of the past by Enlightenment rationalism. Filtered through the prism of Romanticism, the image of communal brotherhoods of anonymous craftsmen working together to build the great cathedrals of Europe awakened utopian longings for a similar sense of altruistic creative collaboration – the foundation of the Bauhaus in 1919 would also draw on the idea as a model. Cathedral-building could even be a symbol of longed-for unity. Groups such as the quasi-medieval Lukasbund (League of St Luke), better known as the Nazarenes, had formed in the early nineteenth century on the basis of similar longings, though the monastic element of that group’s creed – the Lukasbund lived a frugal, communal life devoted to art in the monastery of San Isidoro in Italy – was eschewed by many Expressionists, who generally opted for bohemian hedonism as their means to renounce bourgeois values.

Many Expressionists wanted to revitalise not only art per se, but specifically German art. It was therefore logical that they looked to Northern European traditions for both inspiration and a sense of self-identity. Artists such as Dürer, Cranach and Grünewald were singled out as Masters of the Spätgotik (late Gothic). This categorisation emphasised their Germanic heritage and their separateness from the Italian Renaissance. For many in the early twentieth century, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, with its the harrowing image of Christ’s crucifixion epitomised the inherently expressive qualities of “German” art. Widely-read books, such as Wilhelm Worringer’s Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic) of 1912, presented an account of the Kunstwollen, or “will to art” of the German Gothic that chimed with the spirit of Expressionism. Kirchner kept a volume of Dürer’s drawings close at hand for much of his life. For artists such as Kirchner, Nolde and many others, these forefathers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exhibited qualities they sought to nurture in their own radical new work.

In 1910, Kirchner painted Standing Nude with Hat, a work that draws directly from a sixteenth-century image. He attached enormous emotional and professional importance to the painting, regarding it as one of his most significant early works and as an image of his ideal of feminine beauty at the time. The woman is Dodo, Kirchner’s then girlfriend, who appears in many of his Dresden works. However, Kirchner was working from another, much older “model” too – the seductively smiling Venus painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1532.

Erich Heckel, Windmill in Dangast, 1909.

Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 80.5 cm.

Wilhelm-Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.

Gabriele Münter, Jawlensky and Werefkin, 1908–1909.

Oil on canvas, 32.7 x 44.5 cm.

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Otto Mueller, Bathers in Reeds.

Tempera on hessian, 92 x 79 cm.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

Kirchner’s nude is less “posed” than Cranach’s mythical beauty. But the sinuous line of Cranach’s nude is echoed in Kirchner’s. Both women wear fashionable, contemporary headwear and jewellery that, far from covering them, actually emphasises their nakedness. The courtly eroticism of the sixteenth century is brought up to date in the modern, bohemian context by the motifs, in the background interior of Kirchner’s atelier, of primitivised copulating couples on the drapes and walls. Kirchner would have been able to study the works of Cranach at close hand in Dresden and Munich, but he first came across Cranach’s Venus as a reproduction in the studio of his Brücke colleague, Otto Mueller. Later, when he saw the original on a visit to Frankfurt in about 1925, he sent a postcard to his companion, Erna: “Today I saw the beautiful Venus in the original. Pale pink against black”.

In a letter of 1933 to his long-standing friend and supporter, Dr. Carl Hagemann, who was based in Frankfurt and to whom Kirchner was selling the painting, he urged his patron to take the opportunity to compare his canvas with Cranach’s Venus, which hung in the city’s collection. Of his own painting, Kirchner gave a description in highly subjective, personalised and sexualised terms. Here, he was effectively reiterating a recurrent Expressionist theme – the desire to break down the boundaries between art and life – when he wrote:

“[It] has almost mysterious qualities that lie in the colours and give it a variable appearance, according to the lighting. Often, it almost steps out of the frame. When I once showed it to [the painter] Scherer from Basel, who is now dead, he first thought he saw a living woman and wanted to speak to her. My wife always says I have never again achieved an image of a woman like it, and there’s certainly a bit of jealousy involved with her there, since there are also some very beautiful nudes of her, such as the one you have. But perhaps she’s right, in as far as the first deep love of a woman’s body, which happens only once, has come into this picture”.

The German Expressionist fascination with the art of the Middle Ages was translated into one practice that, it might be argued, was the movement’s greatest aesthetic achievement. This was the stunning revitalisation of the woodcut medium. The woodcut printing technique, which reached its peak in the Gothic and was mastered so consummately by Dürer, had long been usurped by other techniques such as engraving, etching and lithography. The Brücke artists discovered in the woodcut medium the ideal vehicle for a raw, expressive physicality, boldness of design and immediacy of working. In some, they introduced blocks of colour. By giving a new priority within modernism to a print medium that was often marginalised, they challenged conventional hierarchical divisions in the arts. Many other artists of the era, from Kandinsky to Kollwitz, worked extensively with the woodcut. Works like Nolde’s Prophet of 1912 convey a strong sense of how a small, monochrome image could achieve a monumental effect, powerfully expressive of both the subject – the gaunt head of an ancient seer – and the hard wooden physicality of the hewn printing block. Evoking the messianic aspect of the Prophet, the critic Gustav Schiefler wrote in 1927: “Everything: beard, hair, background lines, appear in him to be reflected from an inner fire”.

A tiny woodcut, branding the newly-formed “Artists Union Brücke” with an image not much bigger than a large postage stamp, affirms the philosophy behind the Brücke’s name. The main image shows a bridge, at the apex of which a figure stands, arms raised to the sky or to the far shore. In the foreground, others look on. It has been interpreted as a representation of conventional bourgeois values on our near shore, with the bridge (Brücke) as the transforming way across to the far shore, signifying the revitalisation of art and life. What is generally agreed is that the name Brücke (always used without the definite article “die”) refers to a passage from the prologue to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Standing Nude with Hat, 1910–1920.

Oil on canvas, 205 x 65 cm.

Städel Museum, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt.

August Macke, Girls under Trees, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 119.5 x 159 cm.

Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstareal München, Munich.

“Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss. …

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across [Übergang, also ‘transition’] and a down-going [Untergang, also ‘perishing’].

“I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going across.

“I love the great despisers for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore”.

The central metaphor of the bridge, as the means for transformation – for the crossing to the “other bank” is reiterated a little further in the passage:

“I love him who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself, but who wants to be the spirit of his virtue entirely: thus he steps as spirit over the bridge. […]

“I love him whose soul is deep even in its ability to be wounded, and whom even a little thing can destroy: thus he is glad to go over the bridge”.

The “arrows of longing for the other bank” appear in Brücke iconography in numerous images of archery, the bows and arrows often wielded by vigorous Amazonian nudes. Heckel may have been the bearer of the impulse that led to the name. Kirchner remembered: “One day a young man declaiming loudly from Zarathustra, without a collar and tie, came up my steps and introduced himself as Erich Heckel”.

Max Pechstein, On the Banks of the Lake, 1910.

Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm.

Private collection.

Of all the literary and philosophical sources that were formative for the way Expressionism developed, it was Nietzsche’s writings and Nietzschean ideas that exerted the most seductive appeal. It has been argued that apart from Karl Marx, no other nineteenth-century German thinker has had a greater influence on the development of German thought (and Nietzsche’s works were hungrily devoured by many non-Germans too). Among the ideas that proved most alluring for artists were his diagnoses of the decadence of contemporary culture and his exaltation of creativity as a force pregnant with the potential for vital salvation. He championed instinct over morality. His writings proffered the idea that there were superior men of action who could rise above the crowd. His vitalism and ecstatic “Dionysian” affirmation of life, which embraced extremes of both joy and pain, fuelled Expressionism’s passion, while his damning indictment of conventional morality urged on its rebellion. The Expressionist artists and poets were working at a time when the “Nietzsche cult” was at its height. Popular representations of the philosopher reached outlandish heights (literally!) such as in an image from 1915 of a muscular, heroically idealised Nietzsche atop a Zarathustran mountain range. In 1950, Gottfried Benn, who had been one of the foremost poets of the Expressionist period, reflected:

“Actually, everything that my generation discussed, dissected in its deepest thoughts – one can say suffered through; one can say: enlarged upon – all of that had been already expressed and explored, had already found its definitive formulation in Nietzsche; everything after that was exegesis. His treacherous, tempestuous, lightning manner, his feverish diction, his rejection of all idylls and all general principles, his postulation of a psychology of instinctual behaviour as a dialectic – ‘knowledge as affect,’ all of psychoanalysis and Existentialism. They were all his achievements. As is becoming increasingly clear, he is the great giant of the post-Goethean era”.

When the young Paul Klee arrived in Munich in 1899, he noted in his diary “Nietzsche in the air. Glorification of the self and the instincts. Boundless sexual drives”.

Munich was the other major site of pre-war Expressionism’s flourishing. There, in the old capital of German art nouveau or Jugendstil, other shifting constellations of artists were working, exhibiting and exchanging ideas together in the rich cultural environment of the city, or to be precise, its famous bohemian artists’ quarter, Schwabing. Wassily Kandinsky gave a vivid picture of the district’s pre-war milieu: “The rather odd, quite eccentric and self-assured Schwabing, in whose streets anyone – be they a man or a woman… immediately stood out if they were without a palette, or a canvas, or at least without a portfolio… Everyone painted… or wrote poetry, or made music, or began to dance. You could find at least two ateliers under the roof in every house, where sometimes not exactly very much was painted, but a lot was always debated, disputed, philosophised and conscientiously drunk (which depended more on the state of one’s purse than on the state of one’s morals)”.

Kandinsky tells a story, probably well-worn, that is revealing not only of Munich’s artists’ quarter, but of a whole dimension of the bohemian creed of “living” art: “What is Schwabing?” asks a Berliner visiting Munich. “It’s the northern district of the city” the local replies. “No way”, says another, “it’s a mental state”.

There were many Russians, like Alexander Sakharov, captured in an extraordinary portrait by his friend Alexei von Jawlensky. The dancer visited the painter one evening before a performance, already made up and in costume, which created a particularly androgynous effect. Quickly and spontaneously – reportedly in less than half an hour – Jawlensky produced this free, vigorous and highly memorable image.

At thirty, Kandinsky was a Russian who found himself in this milieu after leaving a promising career as an academic lawyer in Moscow. He headed for the artistic life in Munich in 1896, and quickly graduated from art student with the painter Franz von Stuck, to an important figure in the Munich avant-garde. He was a co-founder and president of the “Phalanx” school and exhibiting group (1901–1904) and of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists; Association of Munich) or NKVM in 1909. Through these activities he established a reputation as an effective organiser, and worked and exhibited together with many other Russian émigrés and German artists, including Gabriele Münter, who became his companion for the duration of his most formative years.

Stylistically, Kandinsky and his colleagues began to push the boundaries of their painting in the late summer of 1908. Four of them – Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin – made a painting trip to the village of Murnau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The following summer, Münter bought a house there. It soon became known as the “Russian House” and provided the base from which the couple and their artist friends painted Murnau and its surroundings in a series of colourful, ever more innovative canvases.

Erich Heckel, Standing Child, 1911.

Colour woodcut, 37.5 x 27.7 cm.

Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Alexej von Jawlensky, Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sakharov, 1909.

Oil on cardboard, 69.5 x 66.5 cm.

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) originated in a project conceived by Kandinsky and a younger colleague, Franz Marc, in 1911. They shared the desire to publish a new kind of periodical.

Before it was published, they staged a rather hastily-assembled group exhibition, the “1. Ausstellung der Redaktion des Blauen Reiter” (1st Exhibition of the Editors of the Blue Rider) at Munich’s Thannhauser gallery (December 1911 – January 1912). It was a motley mix of works by Henri Rousseau, Kandinsky, August Macke, Marc, Münter, the composer Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Delaunay among others. It went on to Berlin, where Herwarth Walden added works by Klee, Kubin, Jawlensky and Werefkin, before showing it as the first Sturm exhibition. A second Blaue Reiter exhibition, of international graphic works – including Picasso and the Russian Malevich – was staged almost immediately, in March and April 1912, at Hans Goltz’s gallery.

Of the planned periodical, only one issue appeared, in 1912, but it is arguably the most important single document of pre-war Expressionism: the Blaue Reiter Almanac. On one level it is a kind of sourcebook for artists of texts and images. However, taken as a whole, it can be read as an entire argument for a radical revision of art and how we look at it. Looking back, writing in 1930, Kandinsky described the motivation behind the Blaue Reiter project:

“It was at that time that my wish matured to assemble a book (a kind of almanac) in which artists would be the only authors. I dreamt primarily of painters and musicians. The ruinous separation of the arts from one another and, furthermore, of ‘Art’ from folk art and children’s art, from ‘Ethnography,’ the solid walls between phenomena that were, in my eyes, so closely related, often even identical: in a word the synthesis left me no peace”.

The almanac contains reproductions of paintings and graphic works by artists from El Greco to Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, the Douanier Rousseau, the Brücke colleagues Kirchner and Heckel, the Blaue Reiter artists and others are juxtaposed with objects and images from Latin America, Alaska, Japan and Africa. There are medieval woodcuts, carvings and tapestries, Bavarian glass paintings, Egyptian shadow figures and children’s drawings. Even leaving aside the texts and music scores in the almanac, the volume is like a cabinet of curiosities, a trove of images combined in ways that are suggestive of unexpected relationships.

The name Der Blaue Reiter is related to a recurrent motif in Kandinsky’s paintings from his Munich period; a rider on horseback. A mounted rider also appears with striking frequency among the objects and images reproduced in the almanac. The colour blue was cherished by both Kandinsky and Marc, who believed that it had a particularly “spiritual” quality.

The artists who were associated with the Blaue Reiter name in 1911 and 1912 by inclusion in their exhibitions and almanac, were numerous. Today, the term is usually used to refer to a smaller group, chiefly Kandinsky, Marc, Münter, Jawlensky, Werefkin, Klee and Macke. These last two enjoyed a particularly creative friendship for a short time before the war, travelling to Tunisia together. The Blaue Reiter circle included some very close friends, but they were less a “group” than the Brücke had been in 1910, for example. Their styles, subjects and theoretical concerns were much more diverse. They did not always agree on fundamental issues – particularly around the nature and role of the “spiritual” in art, yet this milieu proved one of the most fertile of the pre-war Expressionist era.

Max Pechstein, Seated Girl, 1910.

Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.