This is an outstanding exhibition, a massive review of one of the great movements of modern art, with plenty of fascinating cultural context, some questionable digressions, and three novel ‘immersive’ rooms.

The exhibition is titled ‘Expressionism’ but really focuses on a subset of that broad German art movement. A quick skim through any article about Expressionism tells you that arguably the first Expressionist group was Die Brücke (The Bridge), formed in Dresden in 1905 by Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, later joined by Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Mueller. None of these artists appear in, or are mentioned, in this exhibition.

Instead the Tate show focuses on the second circle of artists associated with the term, the group based around Russian lawyer-turned-artist Wassily Kandinsky who, in 1909 set up the New Artists’ Association of Munich (NKVM), and in 1911 published an artistic manifesto in the shape of The Blue Rider Almanac and so came to be called the Blue Rider group. (The story used to go that this was named after a 1903 painting of the same name by Kandinsky, although there’s an alternative story that BR co-founder Franz Marc liked horses and Kandinsky liked riders [specifically, knights on horseback] and they both found the colour blue deeply symbolic.)

Tiger by Franz Marc (1912) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of the Bernhard and Elly Koehler Foundation 1965

Both groups had 15 or so members but this exhibition focuses on a handful of them, namely:

• Wassily Kandinsky
• Gabriele Münter
• Franz Marc
• Marianne von Werefkin
• August Macke
• Lyonel Feininger
• Alexej von Jawlensky
• Paul Klee

The first four, in particular (Kandinsky, Münter, Marc, von Werefkin) form the core of the show, works by them appearing in virtually every room.

The exhibition’s ten big rooms are in loose chronological order so one aspect of strolling through them is to watch the development of these major artists. The two central figures are very clearly Kandinsky and Münter, the earliest members and most powerful presences.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944)

The leading figure by number of works is Kandinsky and the exhibition allows us to watch his evolution as an artist through a series of extraordinary masterpieces. Kandinsky needs little commentary, he is one of the great wonders of early modern art. We start with the beautiful, fairy tale richness of ‘Riding Couple’:

Riding Couple by Wassily Kandinsky (1906-1907) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957

Then see works which are increasingly ‘abstract’ but in which you can still just about make out the subject, such as The Cow (1910):

Installation view of ‘Expressionists Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider’ at Tate Modern 2024 showing ‘The Cow’ by Wassily Kandinsky. Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes)

And then onto the works in which he slips the shackles of realism and creates a new kind of painting in which the colours are designed to reflect spiritual truths, human feelings, triggering and capturing new emotions.

‘Improvisation Deluge’ by Wassily Kandinsky (1913) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957

What I noticed this time round is that there is an OCD business about his paintings. Whether it’s the magical pointillism of the early works or the abstraction of the last ones in the show, a Kandinsky painting is always busy, with lots of lines and colours and dabs and lines.

Gabriele Münter (1877 to 1962)

Kandinsky is closely followed in the number of works included by Gabriele Münter. In fact if you count her photographs (see ‘Ethnicity’ below) she is the most represented artist here.

Münter’s style feels well established from the start. This picture, ‘Listening’, captures one of the many evenings the friends spent sitting round, drinking, smoking and talking about art and spirituality to the early hours.

‘Listening (Portrait of Jawlensky)’ by Gabriele Münter (1909) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957 © DACS 2024

In the caption to it, Münter is quoted as saying:

‘Those who look at my paintings with close attention, will discover the draftswoman in them. Despite their colourfulness, they boast a firm graphic framework. Mostly, I draw my paintings with a black brush onto the board or canvas before I add the colours.’

This was pretty obvious already, but this quote really drives it home and explains the strikingly clear, almost stark outlines which characterise all her work, for example in one of the best images of the show, her portrait of the ubiquitous Marianne von Werefkin (strong black outlines, coloured in).

Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin by Gabriele Münter (1909) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter 1957 © DACS 2024

Münter lived to a ripe old age and in the 1950s gave interviews cheerfully describing the lives of these friends and innovators, what they talked about, how they developed their theories and so on. In particular, she gives a quote which gets to the heart of the entire movement.

‘After a short period of agony, I took a great leap forward, from copying nature – in a more or less impressionist style – to feeling the contents of things, abstracting, conveying an essence.’

There you have it: the Great Leap Forward from the Old World (copying nature in an Impressionist manner) to the Brave New World (trying to convey not what is there, not what you see, but how what you see makes you feel).

The quote made me realise that the word ‘abstract’ has numerous meanings. As an adjective, it means not relating to concrete or specific things in the world and so is a category of thought, and it’s in this sense that it’s used to describe the various schools of ‘abstract’ painting i.e. not depicting anything in the real world. But the phrasing of this quote made me realise that it is also a verb, that ‘to abstract’ something means to extract or remove something – and that this connotation hovers over Münter’s words. By using primary colours in an unnaturalistic way, her paintings remove or extract from a scene its deeper meaning or feeling.

Münter (as far is this exhibition is concerned) never took the last, bold step into total abstraction, which Kandinsky did and which is why he is the more important figure in art history. She continued to paint (on the evidence here) easily recognisable landscapes and people. But what The Great Leap Forward meant for her is that she ceased worrying about painting what was in front of her looked like, and liberated herself to paint how what was in front of her made her feel. The result is a stream of works which are less flashily dramatic than either Kandinsky or Marc but every bit as wonderful. I just loved this piece to bits because, to my mind, you can feel the excitement of an artist set free from the old constraints. A new way of feeling.

Jawlensky and Werefkin by Gabriele Münter (1909) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter 1957 © DACS 2024

Franz Marc (1880 to 1916)

Marc isn’t as present as either Kandinsky or Münter in the first half of the exhibition but comes into his own in the big Room 8 which is packed with masterpieces. In particular it features his breath-takingly masterful images of animals, including The Tiger (at the start of this review), the image of a doe hunkering down in a rainstorm, and this wonderful, lovely, life-affirming painting of happy cows. The world needs more happy cows.

Cows, Red, Green, Yellow by Franz Marc (1911) Lenbachhaus Munich

The joy comes through partly in the unlikely image of the dancing cow but mostly in the uninhibited use of the boldest most vibrant colours. (Also note the absence of the strong black outlines which characterise all of Münter. In this respect, I suppose there’s a heavy squat thereness about Münter’s paintings, whereas the lack of strong outlines, the way Marc just leaves it to the colours themselves to define objects, contributes to his sense of wonderful lightness and energy.)

Modern sensibilities: gender and race

If I am always going on about gender and ethnicity in my exhibition reviews it’s simply because modern curators make them the central issues of their exhibitions, so I am simply reflecting what I read (see the slavery show at the Royal Academy, the feminist exhibitions Women in Revolt and Now You See Us at Tate Britain and Judy Chicago at Serpentine North, the post-colonial works of Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South, and so on and so on).

Thus some visitors might be surprised that the wall labels of the first three rooms contain so many references to ‘gender’ and ‘race’:

Room 1 displaying photographs Münter took on a visit to America:

In other photographs she reflects on social subjects including gender, racial tension in the southern USA, and economic inequalities.

Room 2 describing the group which was to form the Blue Rider:

The collective included women artists and those exploring their gender identities.

The painting belongs to a series featuring Sacharoff in crossdress, exploring gender fluidity through art and performance.

The strong facial features, direct assertive gaze and use of bold colours [in Werefkin’s self portrait] play with traits associated with masculinity employed to confront gender stereotypes of the time.

And that the exhibition goes on to feature entire rooms devoted to gender fluidity, post-colonial criticism, and cultural appropriation.

But this is where we are now. Contemporary art discourse is soaked in concepts and terms derived from sociological discourse around gender, race and ethnicity, colonialism and imperialism, and all aspects of ‘identity’.

Art, even art of the past, is no escape from these contemporary ideologies. The reverse: all art exhibitions and their curators nowadays not only have to take account of old-style feminism (pretty old hat by now), but:

1. of new-style concerns about gender stereotypes, gender binaries, gender roles, gender fluidity, non-binary identity, heteronormativity, the male gaze and more
2. have to be sensitive to all the concerns and terminology generated by decades of post-colonial theory the easiest of which to grasp is ‘racism’, accompanied by newer terms like Eurocentrism and the Eurocentric gaze
3. have to be sensitive to accusations of cultural appropriation, which means that if you paint anything that is not from your own exact culture you run the risk of being accused – as the Blue Riders are accused here – of being patronising and exploiting folk craftspeople and of cultural appropriation

Since the curators repeatedly invoke these ideas, and devote an entire room to gender identity, I am simply reporting what is here. Let’s look at these three topics more closely.

1. Gender

Here’s the curator’s introduction to Room 5, ‘Performing Gender’. As usual I quote the curators’ words at length so you can capture for yourself every nuance of their meaning and it’s not filtered through my words or interpretation:

Traditionally, theatre and performance offered safe environments for the exploration of sexuality and gender. Performers could switch gender and power roles, and engage with transgressive themes. Artist and patron [Marianne von] Werefkin was attracted to the free arts of street theatre and popular entertainment for their freedom of expression and potential to disrupt the highly regulated social structures women were confined to.

Werefkin experimented with expressionist painting while also grappling with questions of identity. This included navigating the legal and social barriers of gender inequality. Her privileged upbringing and financial independence allowed Werefkin to assume a position of power, acting as patron and supporter of the arts – a field traditionally monopolised by men. In this period, such women were given the pejorative label ‘manwoman’ to denote their being ‘unnatural’, members of a ‘third sex’. This perspective was critically explored in the writing of contemporary philosopher and minority rights activist Johannes Holzmann.

Resenting gender binaries, Werefkin stated: ‘I am not a man, I am not a woman, I am I.’ She shared affinities with artists challenging traditional gender roles. This is reflected in her support of performer Sacharoff. Presenting androgynously both on and off stage, Sacharoff explored gender fluidity through new styles of performance that activated form through free movement. Believing that dance resembled music or painting, Sacharoff said: ‘In the art of dance the body must be an elaborate instrument capable of expressing the soul. In this sense, it must be as valid as the word, the sound and the colour’. Performance was central to both Werefkin and Sacharoff’s investigations and constructions of self-identity.

The room features three big photographs of Sacharoff dancing, plus a display case of Werefkin’s notebooks, and then Werefkin’s big blue painting of Sacharoff.

‘The Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff’ by Marianne von Werefkin (1909) Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona

Of this painting the curators write:

Sacharoff entranced audiences with ground-breaking free-movement performances, radically disrupted gender norms by performing in women’s or gender-fluid outfits. Sacharoff also assumed an androgynous off-stage and in social life. Werefkin’s portrait of the dancer in the role of Salome is a powerful celebration of the body, transgressing the sexualisation of the male gaze. Rejecting both traditional and modernist modes of bodily representation, she presents an empowering image of that challenges the turn-of-the-century’s societal norms and expectations.

When I was young, men dressing as women, or adopting sexually ambivalent personas, especially in the worlds of ballet and dance, were well known enough and casually accepted by anyone sympathetic to the arts. Not long ago I went to an exhibition about David Bowie, whose debt to dancer Lindsay Kemp was freely acknowledged back in the 1970s. The adjective ‘androgynous’ was routinely applied to Bowie in the early 70s i.e. 40 years ago.

What feels completely new is the curators making such an immense song-and-dance about it, as if this Russian guy dressing as a woman, sporting a woman’s haircut and makeup, was such a centrally important part of the Blue Rider movement that it requires a room of its own to celebrate it.

This struck me as evidence of contemporary curators’ concerns (obsessions) rewriting and reprioritising what you could call ‘the facts’ of the historical record. For example, later in the show they mention the intense spiritual and religious concerns of Kandinsky and Marc, but don’t properly explore them. If you read other accounts, the diaries and letters of the group, you discover that they spent all their time debating a whole range of spiritual and religious issues, from theosophy to Buddhism. The curators mention these interests but don’t give them anything like the centrality they had to the actual artists.

Instead, what lights their fire are the modern turbo-charged issues of gender stereotypes, gender binaries, gender roles, gender fluidity, non-binary identity, subverting gender stereotypes and societal conventions. Thus in the third paragraph of the curator text for the ‘Performing Gender’ room, you’ll notice they include a quote from Sacharoff himself, saying:

‘In the art of dance the body must be an elaborate instrument capable of expressing the soul. In this sense, it must be as valid as the word, the sound and the colour’.

The key word in this quote is soul but you can see how the curators skip over this, don’t pick up on it, and instead surround it with no fewer than eight references to their own concern, gender issues. The Blue Rider artists’ concern with spirituality isn’t concealed – it’s mentioned in half a dozen places – it is merely eclipsed by the power and charge of the new ideology.

I’m not really bothered by this – as an old member of the Campaign For Homosexual Equality I’ve been a lifelong supporter of the kind of gender liberations they’re talking about. What I find fascinating is the way this intense focus on ‘identity’ (not just sexual but racial, too) has become the central concern of progressive artists, curators, academics and commentators and eclipses all other issues.

Also I’m not that bothered because this is the way culture works. Each new generation has it own concerns and interprets the record of the past (not just the artistic record but the immense record of all human events which we call ‘history’) in the light of these new concerns, and each new generation of scholars, academics and curators reads the past, and projects onto the past, the concerns of the present.

What fascinates me so much about the Tate curators’ editorial decisions and the wall labels justifying them. is that they make this generational, cultural shift so evident.

For me, as an old lefty, it feels like the worldview I grew up in which was concerned with inequality, extremes of wealth and poverty, economic exploitation, which routinely deployed a lexicon of rhetoric around socialism, communism, revolution, nationalisation, trade unions, redistribution and so on, has been completely superseded by this new progressive lexicon concerned with 1) gender stereotypes, gender binaries, gender roles, gender fluidity, non-binary identity, and 2) parallel concerns with race and ethnicity, tied to the red button topics of immigration and refugees.

So to summarise, for me, when I read wall labels like this, I don’t think I’m learning much new about the ostensible subject (one of the members of the Blue Rider group was a Russian dancer who liked dressing as a woman) but I am experiencing a kind of generational shift in discourse and political concerns, away from the hard political and economic concerns of the 1970s and 80s into the new world, the world we now inhabit, which is drenched in super-sophisticated terminology about gender and identity to such an extent that it overshadows or completely eclipses all the other issues raised by the subject, even the ones which the artists themselves said were central to their lives and thinking.

Back to the art: Werefkin

I didn’t like Werefkin’s paintings. I thought they were crude and amateurish next to the works of the big three (Kandinsky, Munter, Marc). When you compare the photos of Sacharoff with this painting, you see how poor it is – not vividly inventive and visually revolutionary like the Big Three’s work, but just scrappy and amateurish.

Nonetheless, Werefkin features very heavily in the exhibition, is references more than Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and August Macke put together. So many of her works are included maybe because 1) she was a consistent organising presence in the group, partly as a rich patron. But also because 2) this exhibition is consciously downplaying the male members and deliberately foregrounding and emphasising the women members of the group (see below). And further, because 3) Werefkin pushes all the up-to-the-minute buttons about gender fluidity, trans men and so on. Here’s another of her paintings.

Self-portrait I by Marianne von Werefkin (about 1910) Lenbachhaus Munich

Actually this one is rather good, but most of her other works here aren’t as successful. Go and make your own mind up.

2. Ethnicity and colonialism

To my surprise Room 4 is nothing to do with art or painting but entirely devoted to photos taken by Münter on an extended trip she and Kandinsky made together to Tunisia.

Münter’s Tunisian photographs were taken during her and Kandinsky’s trip to North Africa in December 1904 to March 1905. During French colonial occupation (1881 to 1956), Tunisia became a popular tourist destination for Europeans. Following established routes, Münter produced her second largest group of photographic works. Marking the start of a period of active artistic experimentation, she explored new forms of expression using traditional media (painting, embroidery and reverse glass painting) alongside new technologies (photography and linocut prints).

Münter’s architectural imagery demonstrates her interest in depicting the simplified, abstracted essence of a scene. They also reveal her occasional engagement with the established European visual culture of orientalism. This genre of painting and photography tended to depict places and people in North Africa and West Asia in reductive, stereotypical and exoticised terms.

Some images reflect Münter’s broader curiosity and engagement with modern Tunisia as an outsider. She captures a range of scenes including photographs of women in different roles – as mothers, travellers, camel riders and active participants in city life. These photographs counter the orientalist trope of women as odalisques – sexualised depictions of enslaved women. They also reveal the complexities of a colonial capital in a way that doesn’t appear in contemporary orientalist paintings.

This seemed a very odd decision. None of these photos really feed into her subsequent paintings, which are overwhelmingly portraits or landscapes of German rural scenes. Choosing to devote an entire room to Münter’s photographs felt to me designed to hit two nails on the head: One is the modern feminist curator’s compulsion to restore women to the narrative of art history. I wouldn’t be surprised if this trip to Tunisia features in standard biographies of Kandinsky and so the curators chose to tell it, but from the point of view of the woman. This obviously fits with the same feminist, restore-women-artists-to-the-record imperative at work in Women in Revolt and Now You See Us at Tate Britain.

But the room also goes out of its way to introduce questions of colonialism, exploitation and race into the exhibition which, otherwise, I don’t think would really crop up, for why would they in a show about a handful of Bohemian artists living in rural German towns quietly painting the scenery? None of them made a habit of painting oriental odalisques so this room felt like an odd digression, fuelled solely by the modern curator’s need to say something about colonialism and racism.

This motive, concern (or obsession) explains the rather odd final paragraph introducing Room 3 which is supposedly setting the historical context of turn-of-the-century Munich where the Blue Rider artists first met. Its ostensible purpose is to give a background to the government of newly unified Germany in the 1870s and 80s.

The government embraced imperial and colonial ambitions including the exploitation of people and resources overseas. Public fascination with world cultures was underpinned by racist narratives and cultural and ethnic hierarchies of imperialism. These perspectives were reinforced by staged public ‘ethnographic exhibitions’ and displays at museums across Germany.

I don’t think we particularly need to know any of this in order to understand the Blue Rider artists, but the curators very obviously need to tell us. It’s part of the new ideology in which even the slightest hint of imperial or colonial involvement must be dragged into the full light of day, described at length, and utterly condemned by curators concerned to tick every box on their Diversity and Inclusion checklist. You can almost see the boxes being ticked off, one by one. Deplore gender inequality, tick. Support trans people, tick. Condemn imperialism, tick. Outraged by racism, tick. (I’m not being that satirical. I work at a big government agency. We have Diversity and Inclusion checklists and mandatory diversity and inclusion courses we have to go on.)

As to Münter’s photos, they’re OK, some of them are pretty good, but nothing to write home about. It’s revealing that the press office don’t included any in their press pack and none of them are on the exhibitions web pages. No – because people have come to see the paintings. The main impression I got from them was how little has, apparently changed. Some of them looked like they could have been taken yesterday.

3. Cultural appropriation

‘Room’ 7 is the name given to the narrow corridor in the Tate Modern layout linking small Room 5 (Performing Gender) and the massive Room 8, the one containing masterpieces by Marc and Kandinsky, in particular. This narrow passage is tailor-made for display cases more than pictures hanging on a wall, and here it is used to display half a dozen examples of the kind of naive folk art from the rural regions around Munich, specifically the idyllic market town of Murnau where Kandinsky and Münter lived from 1909 to 1911 and and which they, especially Münter, liked to include in their paintings, especially still lives.

Thus there’s a still life by Münter, ‘Madonna with Poinsettia‘ (1911) alongside the actual wooden statuette of the Madonna which features in the painting. Cool. And the other cases contain other craft objects which feature in various of their works.

However, these days no work of art goes unpunished and so the curators use this mildly interesting and, you’d have thought, fairly harmless little display, to spank both the artists and, by implication, the naughty gallery goer who just likes this kind of thing without asking the difficult questions required by their post-colonial studies tutor. Because the artists’ habit of collecting objects made by local craftsmen turns out to be far from innocent:

Objects produced by local and international artists and craftspeople who were not academically trained were perceived by European modernists as ‘unspoiled’ and ‘authentic’. When shown in modernist exhibitions and illustrated in publications these works were often presented anonymously and removed from their original context. They were showcased purely for their stylistic qualities, artistry and boldness of colour.

The curators don’t use the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ but they don’t have to. Torn from their cultural context, unattributed to the people who made them, patronised as ‘unspoilt’, these objects now have to be regarded through the half century of post-colonial discourse which nowadays throngs the humanities.

If you haven’t completed your reading list of post-colonial theory, tut tut, why not?

The Tate family of galleries provide an outstanding service, all round the country, of curating, presenting, and introducing the best of world art in beautiful settings, with all manner of helpful introductory videos and tours and books and so on. But you can’t help feeling that very often visiting one of their exhibitions is like walking through a series of Guardian editorials or walking into a sociology seminar at university to discover you’re the only white male in the room and everyone is looking at you accusingly. In the old days you visited an exhibition to be informed. Nowadays you are more likely to be lectured.

Evidence from Amazon

I was toying with buying the exhibition catalogue on Amazon (£35 at the exhibition, £22 on Amazon) when I was struck by several things which confirm the interpretation I’ve just given. One is that the brief book summary provided by the publisher mentions Alexander Sacharoff’s freestyle dancing and Gabriele Münter’s photographs before any actual painting, and doesn’t mention Kandinsky, the central figure in the movement, at all.

Then I was gratified by the comments of a couple of people who’d bought and read the book and shared my impression of the obtrusive, obstructive nature of the curators’ concerns:

“I bought the book for the reproductions and, unlike the previous reviewer, I am happy with them. However, the texts dwell heavily on all the usual 21st century concerns and issues in an attempt to force the art of the Blue Rider group to relate to them. But the artists concerned lived in a different era with different concerns. It would be more enlightening to try to understand them in their own context.”

And:

“Very good illustrations of work from all The Blue Rider group but the essays seem to want to impose today’s values on a group working over a 110 years ago.”

Exactly.

Other figures

There were about 20 members of the NKVM and 15 of the Blue Rider group but it felt, to me, as if almost all of them were marginalised in order to focus on the previously unknown photography of Gabriele Münter and the gender-fluid issues surrounding von Werefkin.

Thus there were a few bright and colourful abstracts by Robert Delaunay who exhibited with the Rider group, and an article about him appeared in the Almanac – he was more rooted in Paris and associated with the colour experiments of the movement Apollinaire named Orphism, but I would have liked to have seen more of his light and happy works.

Circular Shapes, Moon no. 1 by Robert Delaunay (1913) Lenbachhaus Munich and Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich

Sonia Delaunay is represented by an interesting experimental work, ‘Prose on the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France 1913’, which is a long scroll or parchment hanging which combines, on the left, a series of her abstract paintings designed to accompany or illustrate or interact with a long prose poem by French poet Blaise Cendrars printed down the right-hand side. The pair called this format a ‘simultaneous book’ whose aim was to ‘bring together text and design to express spoken words through colour’.

August Macke is represented by some wood cuttings, a portrait of his wife, and a handful of very distinctive scenes of urban life, of the urban bourgeoisie out for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon. His figures have a characteristic tube shape, elongated and willowy, while his trees and leaf canopies are converted into semi-abstract curves.

Promenade by Auguste Macke (1913) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Bernhard and Elly Koehler 1965

Macke appears to have been an eminently sane man, who wrote:

‘work for me means a thorough enjoyment of nature, the blazing sun and trees, shrubs, human beings, animals, plants and pots, tables, chairs, mountains, water of illuminated becoming. I immerse myself in the snow-drop’s friendly nodding, in the rhythm of the bird-laden twigs swaying in the sun…’

Erma Bossi was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1875. She met Kandinsky and Münter in Munich after moving there from the multicultural city of Trieste. She was drawn to Werefkin’s circle and became a member of the NKVM. She is represented by a portrait of Werefkin in her role as founder and host of the artistic and intellectual salon, and by this lively painting of the circus.

‘Circus’ by Erma Bossi (1909) Lenbachhaus Munich, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich

Maria Franck-Marc, born in 1876, was an artist and member of the Blue Rider collective. Born in Berlin, she moved to Munich to study at the Ladies’ Academy of the Royal School of Art. It was here that she met Franz Marc. An active participant in the Blue Rider group, she took part in conversations around the Almanac concept and content. She also exhibited at the second Blue Rider exhibition.

Franck met Marc in 1905. The couple broke social conventions by moving in together before marrying several years later, in 1913. There’s an (uncharacteristically dull) portrait of her by her husband, and three of her own paintings which reveal her interest in children and childhood as a subject.

‘Girl with Toddler’ by Maria Franck-Marc (about 1913) Lenbachhaus Munich © Legal succession of the artist

Another artist I could have done with seeing a lot more of was Lyonel Feininger, born in 1871 in America to German parents who returned to the Fatherland in 1887. He is notable for a very distinctive sort of vertical cubism, in which fairly straightforward buildings are transformed into tall, thin Vorticist apparitions as if from a science fiction future. He only has two paintings here, including ‘Behind the Church‘ (1916), and I’d have liked to have seen a lot more of his stuff.

It seemed odd that artists like Feininger (2 paintings), Robert Delaunay (3), Sonia Delaunay (1), Elizabeth Epstein (1), even the great Paul Klee (2 paintings) and quite a few others, feel very under-represented, while Gabriele Münter has not only a dozen or more paintings but an entire room devoted to her 20 or so pretty average holiday snaps. But then, you’ve read my reasons why I think the curators have distorted or re-oriented their reading of the past, in order to conform to modern concerns.

Three immersions

Exhibition organisers are always keen to diversify and jazz up their shows with something inventive and the curators of this one have excelled themselves.

1. Colours and prisms

There’s a room devoted to the Blue Rider artists’ interest in colour theory. This concerns the visual and psychological impact of every colour and shade of colour, added to which a painted like Kandinsky attributed to colours powerful spiritual vibrations (as explained in his book ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’). I’ve been to several exhibitions devoted to this subject, for example Making Colour at the National Gallery, and read several books and, in the end, find it extremely dull. Not least because every artist has a different theory and palette and these quickly become confusing. But mostly because, while they’re explaining the colour theory of Newton or Goethe or Monet or van Gogh, these books ignore the elephant in the room which is the supersaturation of modern life with visual elements drenched in the cunning use of colour which would probably provide more useful and up-to-date examples we could all relate to.

But it’s in this room that the curators have set up small prisms on two stands through which visitors are intended to view Franz Marc’s masterpiece Deer in the Snow II by Franz Marc (1911). The idea is that when you look through the prism you should notice how the colours faintly overlap. These overlapping edges either produce a neutral grey, signifying complementary colours, or coloured edges. signifying uncomplementary ones. (In case it doesn’t work for you, or there’s a queue for the prisms, there’s a big reproduction on the wall showing the blurred effect you’re striving for.)

Expressionists Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider installation view at Tate Modern 2024. Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes)

This was, I’m afraid, a little underwhelming.

2. White light

A bit better is the room off to one side which contains another experiment. Tate asked contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson to explore the impact of changed lighting conditions on our reading of Kandinsky’s abstracts, specifically hanging a work titled ‘Improvisation Gorge’ in a room lit by a very bright overhead fluorescent lamp.

‘Improvisation Gorge’ by Wassily Kandinsky (1914) Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957

The aim is to show how a different quality of light from that encountered in the rest of the gallery, changes our reading of the painting. To be honest, it just made the painting look a bit washed out to me, and quite quickly the very bright white light made me feel uncomfortable. Reminded me too much of the overbright open plan office where I work.

Installation view of ‘Expressionists Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider’ at Tate Modern 2024 showing ‘Improvisation Gorge’ by Wassily Kandinsky (1914) in the Olafur Eliasson room. Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes)

3. Schoenberg and atonalism

On 2 January 1911, Kandinsky and Marc attended a concert of works by the experimental composer Arnold Schönberg. A few days later Kandinsky created his work ‘Impression III (Concert)’ as a visual response. Like the Riders, Schönberg wanted to create a new, spiritual art which broke free of traditional forms and constraints. His great achievement was to jettison notions of melody, harmony and all the great forms of repetition (sonata, fugue etc) and instead to create music which exists in the present. In writings and conversation Schönberg associated musical tones with colours and the mixing of instruments, timbres and musical effects with an artist’s mixture of composition and colour. He even made paintings of his own which were considered good enough to be included in Rider exhibitions.

For their part, several members of the Blue Rider were professionally trained musicians: Kandinsky was a skilled cellist and Klee and Feininger were serious violinists and so could perform Schönberg’s compositions.

Kandinsky’s intense interest in the relationship between colour and sound naturally led to an interest in the condition known as synaesthesia, where a person experiences one sense through another, such as perceiving sound as colour and vice versa.

Schönberg contributed to the Almanac with an essay, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, which explored the abstract nature of poetry as it relates to sound.

This immersive room focuses on these themes. A display case shows the book he created which combined free verse and woodcuts and which he called Klänge or ‘Sounds’, published in 1913. In a cool bit of digital technology, the entire book has been digitised and you can skim through the pages and select ones to blow up to full size on a monitor.

But the ‘immersive’ aspect of the room is that while one wall is devoted to displaying ‘Impression III (Concert)’, hidden speakers play some of the Schönberg pieces which inspired the painting, namely his breakthrough pieces, the Second String Quartet in F Sharp Minor opus 10, and the Three Piano Pieces, opus 11.

This is very successful although not, it turns out, particularly novel. The same thing was done at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna in 2000 and, I imagine, at other art centres, too.

Still, the non-sequitur nature of Schönberg’s pieces, in which musical events follow each other unpredictably, without reference to previous moments or traditional structures, correlates closely to the Kandinsky piece in which different colours and tones and shapes exist in themselves, in their own right, unconstrained by the requirement to refer to anything in the world. All this is summed up in a famous letter Kandinsky wrote to Schönberg, in which he describes ‘the particular destinies, the autonomous paths, the lives of individual voices’ of the latter’s compositions. These, he stated, ‘are precisely what I have been looking for in pictorial form.’

This is a nice installation, well worth sitting on the bench, in the darkened room, calming right down from the packed exhibition rooms, slowing right down to appreciate every colour and nuance of the painting, alongside the ‘autonomous paths’ and unexpected moments of this strange, beguiling music. If only they could lay on tea and snacks I’d have closed my eyes and let my imagination provide colours and patterns to match Schönberg’s free-running tones.

The promotional video

Related links

• Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter And The Blue Rider continues at Tate Modern until 20 October 2024
• Room by room guide
• Download the large print guide (PDF)

Related reviews

• More Tate Modern reviews
• The Expressionists by Wolf-Dieter Dube (1972)
• Marc by Susanna Partsch (1991)
• Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)