Der Blaue Reiter Brings New Artistic Experiments Together

In December 1911, an acute artistic dispute fractured the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, an avant-garde association founded in the Bavarian capital in 1909. The conflict culminated when the group jury rejected Wassily Kandinsky's increasingly abstract canvas, Composition V, for its third winter exhibition. In response, Kandinsky, along with painter Franz Marc and collaborator Gabriele Münter, withdrew to stage an independent presentation at the Heinrich Thannhauser Moderne Galerie. Operating in spaces directly adjacent to their former colleagues, the breakaway organizers mounted what they formally titled the First Exhibition of the Editorial Board of Der Blaue Reiter, initiating one of the key episodes of early twentieth-century modernism.

The core of this nascent circle rested on a close intellectual partnership between Kandinsky and Marc, who served as sole editors of their ambitious publications and exhibitions. Kandinsky had painted a piece titled Der Blaue Reiter in 1903, and the origin of the group's name has been explained in more than one way. Kandinsky later attributed the name to a conversation between the two men, recounting that Marc loved horses, he himself favored riders, and both shared an affinity for the color blue. For Kandinsky, blue held profound spiritual associations, functioning as a hue that stimulated human longing for the infinite as he outlined in his 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art.