The Blue Rider - the history of the art movement, Kandinsky, Marc, and the almanac

Der Blaue Reiter is the art movement that gave German Expressionism its most lyrical and spiritually charged expression, and the circle whose art today hangs as posters in more Nordic homes than that of any other avant-garde movement of the 1910s. The group was formed in Munich in the winter of 1911, held together for barely three years, and disbanded when the First World War broke out. Yet those years are enough to explain why blue horses, floating fields of color, and almost musical compositions became a visual language of their own - a language that Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, and Paul Klee developed in parallel without ever signing a common manifesto.

What is unusual about Der Blaue Reiter is that the movement was never an association with a membership register and statutes, but an editorial project. Kandinsky and Marc called themselves the editorial team, published an almanac, and organized two exhibitions to demonstrate what they meant. That was precisely why the circle became so open: Bavarian folk paintings on glass, African masks, medieval woodcuts, children's drawings, and Arnold Schönberg's scores were placed side by side with Cézanne and Picasso. This openness is also why the style has aged so well - the movement's works function just as well in a Swedish living room in 2026 as in a Munich gallery in 1912.

Contents
↓ What is Der Blaue Reiter?
↓ The break in Munich, 1909-1911
↓ The almanac and the two exhibitions
↓ The artists in the circle
↓ Style, color, and spirituality
↓ The war, the embezzlement, and Stockholm 1916
↓ The legacy: Bauhaus, Lenbachhaus, and the market
↓ Der Blaue Reiter at home
↓ Timeline
↓ Related art movements
↓ Frequently asked questions about Der Blaue Reiter

What is Der Blaue Reiter?

Der Blaue Reiter - in Swedish Den blå ryttaren - is the name given to the exhibition and publishing activities that Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Franz Marc (1880-1916) conducted in Munich between December 1911 and summer 1914. The two were the sole editors of the almanac of the same name, published in mid-May 1912 by Piper Publishers in an edition of around 1,100 copies. A loose circle of painters gathered around the editorial team: Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Alfred Kubin, Heinrich Campendonk, Albert Bloch, and the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk.

Unlike Die Brücke in Dresden, which was a formal association of artists with shared studio work, Der Blaue Reiter was never an organization. There were no membership fees, no board, and no shared style. What united them was a conviction: that art should express spiritual truth rather than depict visual impressions, that color carried its own meaning independent of the object it described, and that painting and music were related art forms. Kandinsky formulated this idea in the essay On the Spiritual in Art, printed in Munich in December 1911.

Quick facts: Active from 1911-1914, based in Munich and the village of Murnau in Bavaria · Founders and sole editors: Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc · The first exhibition opened on December 18, 1911, at Heinrich Thannhauser's and displayed 43 works by 14 artists · The almanac was published in May 1912 with more than 140 image reproductions and 14 essays · The edition was financed by the industrialist Bernhard Koehler · The traveling exhibition toured eleven European cities from 1912-1914, including Gothenburg · Gabriele Münter donated more than 1,000 works to the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1957 · Franz Marc's Die Füchse from 1913 was sold at Christie's in London on March 1, 2022, for £42.66 million, the artist's auction record.

The Munich split, 1909-1911

The prehistory begins with Neue Künstlervereinigung München, N.K.V.M., founded in 1909 on the initiative of Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky, Adolf Erbslöh, and the collector Oscar Wittenstein. Kandinsky became the association's first chairman and organized the exhibitions in 1909 and 1910. It was here that he inserted the so-called four-square-meter clause into the statutes, a rule governing the size of the area an artwork submitted could occupy - a detail that later gave him an argument for leaving the association.

The tension grew as Kandinsky's painting became increasingly abstract. The conservative forces within N.K.V.M. wanted to hold on to a recognizable world of motifs. Kandinsky resigned as chairman on January 10, 1911, and was succeeded by Adolf Erbslöh, but remained an ordinary member. In the meantime, he had found an ally: he met Franz Marc around the turn of 1910-1911, and their friendship immediately proved productive. On June 19, 1911, Kandinsky wrote to Marc for the first time about the idea of publishing a joint book - initially under the working title Die Kette, The Chain.

Composition V and the parallel exhibition

The breakdown came in December 1911. Kandinsky submitted Composition V to N.K.V.M.'s third exhibition, and the jury rejected the work. Kandinsky, Münter, Marc, and Alfred Kubin immediately left the association and organized their own exhibition in record time in the rooms next to the official one - in the same building, with the same gallerist. Kandinsky later recalled that he had sensed the dispute well in advance and had therefore prepared an ample body of exhibition material. The fact that the two exhibitions could open simultaneously made the effect all the greater.

Where Does the Name Come From?

According to Kandinsky's own account from 1930, the name arose over a cup of coffee in Sindelsdorf: they both loved blue, Marc loved horses, and Kandinsky loved riders. Kandinsky had also painted a canvas titled The Blue Rider as early as 1903. The art historian Klaus Lankheit has shown that the title was added to the painting at a later date, making the connection uncertain. There is no doubt, however, that blue held deep significance for Kandinsky - in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he describes how the color awakens a longing for the eternal, and the darker the blue, the stronger the call.

The Almanac and the Two Exhibitions

Der Blaue Reiter was, in practice, three things: a book and two exhibitions. Together, they constitute the movement's entire public output, produced over fourteen months.

First Exhibition, December 1911

On December 18, 1911, Erste Ausstellung der Redaktion Der Blaue Reiter opened at Heinrich Thannhauser's Moderne Galerie in Munich. The exhibition presented 43 works by 14 artists and ran into the first days of 1912. The participants included Henri Rousseau, Albert Bloch, David and Vladimir Burliuk, Heinrich Campendonk, Robert Delaunay, Elisabeth Epstein, Eugen von Kahler, Kandinsky, Macke, Marc, Münter, Jean Bloé Niestlé, and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who also painted. A composer hanging alongside the painters was no coincidence but the whole point.

The exhibition then went on tour. Between January 1912 and July 1914, it was shown in Cologne, Berlin, Bremen, Hagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Budapest, Oslo, Helsinki, Trondheim, and Gothenburg. This means that Swedish audiences encountered Der Blaue Reiter while the movement was still active - a fact often overlooked when German Expressionism is described as something that reached the Nordic countries only after the war.

Second Exhibition, February 1912

The second exhibition opened at Neue Kunst Hans Goltz in Munich on 12 February 1912 and ran until 2 April. It was devoted entirely to works in black and white: drawings, watercolours and prints. Here the circle expanded further, with contributions from, among others, Paul Klee and artists from Die Brücke. Limiting an exhibition to black and white was a deliberate choice - it forced viewers to read line and form without the help of colour, and it is one reason why graphic black-and-white sheets from the period still work so well as graphic posters.

The Almanac, May 1912

Franz Marc received the first printed copy on 11 May 1912. The book contained more than 140 image reproductions and 14 substantial essays, and the costs were covered by the industrialist and collector Bernhard Koehler, a relative of August Macke. The content deliberately crossed boundaries: Marc's essay Spiritual Treasures illustrated with children's drawings, German woodcuts and Chinese painting; Roger Allard on Cubism; Schönberg's text on the relationship to text, together with a facsimile of his song Herzgewächse; musical facsimiles by Alban Berg and Anton Webern; Macke's essay Masks; and Kandinsky's stage text The Yellow Sound.

The selection of images says everything about the movement's values. Bavarian glass painting, Egyptian dolls, Russian folk art, Oceanic sculpture and medieval German woodcuts were given as much space as modern French art. Five works by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin combined were outnumbered by seven works by Henri Rousseau and thirteen drawings by children. A second volume was planned but halted by the war; instead, a new edition of the original was printed in 1914.

"Our rooms were close to those of the N.K.V.M. exhibition. It caused a sensation. Since I sensed the quarrel in time, I had prepared ample material for Der Blaue Reiter. Thus both exhibitions took place simultaneously. … Revenge was sweet." - Wassily Kandinsky on December 1911

The artists in the group

Since Der Blaue Reiter had no membership list, the boundary is fluid, but a handful of artists form its core. They worked closely together in Munich and in the village of Murnau on Lake Staffelsee, where Münter bought a house in 1909 that became the group's summer base.

Wassily Kandinsky - the theorist

Kandinsky was the group's intellectual driving force and the one who pushed painting furthest towards pure abstraction. His Compositions from 1910–1914 are among the earliest entirely non-representational canvases in Western art history. Those who wish to delve deeper into his development can read our fact page on Wassily Kandinsky.

Franz Marc - the animals and the theory of colour

Marc painted almost exclusively animals, and he did so according to his own color system: blue represented the masculine and spiritual, yellow the feminine and gentle, and red the material and brutal. Works such as Blue Horse I from 1911 and The Large Blue Horses from the same year are among the most reproduced motifs in all of German modernism. Marc's market value is also the movement's highest: Die Füchse from 1913, a composition of two intertwined foxes in fragmented red and orange geometry, was sold at Christie's in London on March 1, 2022, for £42.66 million. The work had previously been restituted by the city of Düsseldorf to the heirs of Kurt Grawi, a collector persecuted by the Nazis.

Gabriele Münter – the archivist who saved the movement

Münter was Kandinsky's partner from 1902 to 1916 and one of the group's most independent painters, with strongly simplified forms and broad contour lines drawn from Bavarian glass painting. Her most important contribution to posterity, however, was of a different kind: during the Nazi era, she hid a large number of works in the cellar of the house in Murnau. On her eightieth birthday in 1957, she donated more than 1,000 works to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich – including around 90 oil paintings by Kandinsky, approximately 330 watercolors and drawings, 24 stained-glass paintings, 28 sketchbooks, and just over 25 of her own paintings.

August Macke and Paul Klee

Macke was the member of the group closest to French Orphism and Robert Delaunay's color prisms; his market and park scenes have a clarity that differs from Kandinsky's mysticism. Paul Klee took part in the second exhibition and contributed to the almanac, but developed his true visual language only during and after the war. His later work is described in greater detail on the fact page about Paul Klee.

Visual language, color, and spirituality

While Die Brücke depicted the anxiety of the big city with jarring color and angular forms, Der Blaue Reiter sought something else: an image beyond visible reality. The movement is considered part of Expressionism, but it is its lyrical branch. Context for this is provided on our page about Expressionism.

Color as an independent force

The fundamental idea was that color acts directly on the viewer, much as a tone acts on the listener, without having to take the detour through an object. This is why Marc could paint a horse blue without it being perceived as a mistake: the horse was not a depiction but a bearer of a feeling. Kandinsky explicitly spoke of the timbres of painting and gave his canvases musical titles such as Improvisation and Composition. This parallel thinking between eye and ear is the movement's most original contribution.

Inner necessity

The concept of innere Notwendigkeit, inner necessity, is the key to Kandinsky’s writing from December 1911. A work is valid if it springs from an inner need in the artist, not if it follows the rules of the academy or the tastes of the market. It sounds simple, but it had radical consequences: if inner necessity does not require a recognizable subject, then no subject is needed. This is where abstract art begins, a development that we continue to explore on the page about abstract art.

Folk art, children’s drawings, and the non-European

The group’s interest in Bavarian glass painting, Russian folk art, and non-European sculpture was not exoticism for its own sake, but a search for directness. In children’s drawings and in the images of anonymous folk artists, they saw a visual language untouched by academic convention. The fact that the almanac gave thirteen children’s drawings more space than Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin combined was a deliberate stance that shocked their contemporaries.

The war, dispersal, and Stockholm 1916

The war shattered the group within a few weeks. Kandinsky was a Russian citizen and was forced to leave Germany in August 1914. Jawlensky and Werefkin fled to Switzerland. Macke enlisted and was killed as early as September 26, 1914, in Champagne, aged 27. Franz Marc was killed by shrapnel outside Verdun on March 4, 1916, aged 36 - the week before, he had been placed on a list of artists to be withdrawn from the front, but the order came too late.

The Swedish episode

Sweden plays an unexpectedly central role in the movement’s final phase. Kandinsky traveled to Stockholm before Christmas 1915, and on February 1, 1916, his solo exhibition opened at Gummesons Konsthandel. In March of the same year, the same gallery presented a solo exhibition of Gabriele Münter, and Kandinsky wrote a catalogue text dedicated to her in which he highlighted precisely the qualities in her painting that he valued most highly. It was their last meeting. Münter then withdrew from the art world and remained in Scandinavia until 1920, while Kandinsky returned to Russia and remarried. The fact that the two central figures of The Blue Rider said farewell to each other on Birger Jarlsgatan is a footnote rarely mentioned in Swedish contexts.

The Nazi era and the losses

During the 1930s, the group’s art was classified as degenerate. Works were confiscated from German museum collections in 1937, sold abroad, or destroyed. Paradoxically, this spread the movement internationally: paintings that left Germany ended up in American and Swiss collections and made the artists known far beyond their country of origin. It was not until 1949 that Haus der Kunst in Munich was able to present a major retrospective under the direction of Ludwig Grote, with loans from, among others, Münter, Nina Kandinsky, and Sonia Delaunay.

The legacy: Bauhaus, Lenbachhaus, and the market

Kandinsky and Klee were both invited to the Bauhaus, where they taught during the 1920s and passed on ideas about the independent power of color to an entire generation of designers. The connection is explored in greater detail on the information page about Bauhaus. In 1923, Kandinsky, Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Jawlensky formed the group Die Blaue Vier at the initiative of art dealer Galka Scheyer, who organized their exhibitions in the United States from 1924 onward, thereby carrying the legacy across the Atlantic.

Lenbachhaus in Munich now oversees the world's largest collection of Der Blaue Reiter, built around Münter's 1957 donation. From 10 March 2026, the collection will be shown in the major presentation Über die Welt hinaus. Der Blaue Reiter, which runs until 5 September 2027 - information is available from Lenbachhaus. In Sweden, the closest context can be found at Moderna Museet, whose collection of German Expressionism comprises around 180 works, and at Gothenburg Museum of Art, which presented the movement's touring exhibition as early as the 1910s.

On the auction market, Marc is by far the most expensive, with a record of £42.66 million set in 2022. Kandinsky's top prices are in the same range, while Münter was long severely undervalued and has only been reassessed during the 2010s and 2020s, as female modernists have received more attention in research and exhibitions.

Der Blaue Reiter at home

Few art movements are as rewarding to decorate with. The motifs are often square or nearly square, the color palette is saturated but never garish, and the compositions have an inherent sense of movement that makes them rewarding to look at for a long time. This makes them useful both as a solo focal point and as part of a larger gallery wall.

One work, plenty of breathing room

Marc's animal motifs and Kandinsky's early compositions can carry an entire room on their own. Hang a large-format work centered above the sofa or bed, with plenty of empty space around it, and let the color do the work. Avoid surrounding such a motif with many small pictures - it diminishes its impact. If you still want to create a larger gallery wall, you'll find practical measurements and spacing in our guide to gallery walls.

Color schemes that work in Nordic interiors

The movement's blue, yellow and red tones complement light walls in warm white, off-white or light gray-beige. In a darker room with a green or deep blue wall, the same motif becomes dramatic but needs more light directed at it. A good rule of thumb is to pick up just one of the image's colors in textiles or ceramics in the room - not three. More discussion of color choices can be found in the article on choosing the right art for your home, and for those seeking saturated color, there is the colorful posters collection.

Frame and glass

Motifs from Der Blaue Reiter look best in simple frames in light oak, walnut or matte black, preferably with a generous mat that gives the areas of color room to breathe. Avoid gold frames - they belong to an entirely different era and compete with the image's own colors. Practical advice on profiles, glass and mounting can be found in our article on framing art.

Tip: Combine a colorful subject in the style of Marc's blue horses with a black-and-white graphic print in the same size and an identical frame. The contrast between saturated color and clean line reflects exactly how the movement itself worked with its two exhibitions in 1911 and 1912 - and creates a cohesive display without becoming monotonous.

Timeline

1903 - Kandinsky paints the canvas The Blue Rider, whose title is later associated with the movement's name.
1909 - Neue Künstlervereinigung München is founded; Kandinsky becomes chairman. Gabriele Münter buys the house in Murnau.
January 10, 1911 - Kandinsky resigns as chairman of the N.K.V.M. and is succeeded by Adolf Erbslöh.
June 19, 1911 - In a letter to Franz Marc, Kandinsky proposes a joint almanac.
December 1911 - Composition V is rejected by the N.K.V.M. jury; Kandinsky, Marc, Münter and Kubin leave the association.
December 18, 1911 - First exhibition opens at Thannhauser in Munich with 43 works by 14 artists. That same month, Concerning the Spiritual in Art is printed.
February 12-April 2, 1912 - Second exhibition, featuring only black-and-white works, at Neue Kunst Hans Goltz.
May 11, 1912 - Franz Marc receives the first copy of the almanac.
1913 - The group takes part in the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin, organized by Herwarth Walden and the Der Sturm gallery.
September 26, 1914 - August Macke falls in Champagne, aged 27.
February–March 1916 – Kandinsky and Münter hold solo exhibitions at Gummesons Konsthandel in Stockholm and meet for the last time.
4 March 1916 – Franz Marc is killed outside Verdun at the age of 36.
1923 – Die Blaue Vier is formed by Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky.
1937 – Works by the group are confiscated from German collections as degenerate art.
1957 – Münter donates over 1,000 works to Lenbachhaus on her eightieth birthday.
1 March 2022 – Marc's Die Füchse sells for £42.66 million at Christie's in London.
10 March 2026 – Lenbachhaus opens Über die Welt hinaus. Der Blaue Reiter, running until 5 September 2027.

Related art movements

Der Blaue Reiter stands at the center of a dense network of movements. Moving forward in time, it leads to abstract art and onward to Bauhaus. Looking back, it is connected to Expressionism as a whole and to Fauvism, whose liberation of color was a direct prerequisite. The movement's rougher sister group in Dresden was Die Brücke, founded in 1905 and the first cohesive artists' group of German Expressionism. Running parallel in time are Cubism, which the almanac explicitly took a position on, and Futurism. Among individual artists, Kandinsky and Klee are the obvious points of entry. A complete overview of all the artists and movements is available in our Knowledge Base. In the 1912 almanac, Kandinsky and Marc particularly highlighted the self-taught Henri Rousseau as an example of an original way of seeing images.

For those who wish to read further at the source level, a detailed overview is available in Wikipedia’s article on Der Blaue Reiter, along with structured metadata in Wikidata.

Frequently asked questions about Der Blaue Reiter

If you would like to bring home something inspired by the movement's visual language, you will find saturated, expressive designs in our collection of abstract posters, classics by renowned masters among our famous artists, and the geometric extension of the same ideas among our Bauhaus posters. You can find more advice on how abstract designs work together in our guide to abstract posters.