Der Blaue Reiter

Auguste MackeGabriele Munter

Paul Klee

Gabrielle Munter (1877-1962).• Studied art in Dusseldorf and Bonn, travelled to America at

21.• Denied any real access to formal art training --> Kandinsky

is her first teacher to take her work seriously. The two engage to marry, though Kandinsky still has a wife in Russia.

• 1906 travels Europe with Kandinsky, meets the Fauves, though no big influence on her work.

• 1908-9 the forms of her work become more simplified, brush work becomes thicker. Paints black contours of forms, then fills in the colour --> a process showed to her by Jawlensky who was working on painting on glass (he called the process synthesis of art)

• Her work synthesised the expressiveness of Fauve colours with an ordered formal organisation often based on pyramidal forms.

• Eventually splits with Kandinsky during the war…they never marry. She continued to paint, concentrating on women in interiors and theme of convelescence (healing).

• Her work often includes windows which suggest isolation from the outside world.

Munter, Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, 1909

• Werefkin was the wife of Alexij Jewlensky and friend of Munter.

• Munter wrote: “I painted the Werefkina in 1909 before the yellow base of my house. It was a bombastic appearance, self-confidently, authoritatively, richly dressed, with a hat like a carriage wheel, on which all kinds of things had a place.” --> hat is possibly due to Werefkin’s social position and wanting to stand out amongst the other women in the small village.

• The triangular composition similar to Renaissance portraiture, though Werefkin gazes at the viewer from a sideways glance.

• Though that the low p.o.v. of Munter alludes to her lesser status of her subject, also due to the fact that Werefkin was a baroness.

• Could also be an allusion to the idea of Uberfrau --> a term to express the new women who participated equally in the economy to men (advancement of women?)

Gabrielle Munter, Boating, 1910. Oil on canvas, 1250 x

733cm

Gabriele Münter Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table in the

Murnau House (1912)

Gabriele Münter. Meditation. 1917.

Auguste Macke (1887-1914)• Studied art from 1904-1906 (Dusseldorf)• 1907 travels to Paris, inspired by work of Degas and Manet. Later become inspired by Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat.• 1910 sees one of the New Artists’ Alliance shows and is critical of their lack of the human element. He is interested in the material world.• He has difficulty understanding Kandinsky’s ‘intellectual’ art, but contributes to Blaue Reiter’s shows. He takes a much different approach to art feeling that it does not come from the will nor from necessity, it comes from ability.• He visits Paris with Marc and meets Delaunay, whose work he becomes deeply influenced by because of the fracturing of the forms and picture plane. He felt Delaunay’s work had a real sense of movement due to his use of simultaneous contrasts of colour.• His work become filled with light from within the work, often starting in the centre with light colours and working out towards darker colours.

August Macke, Self-portrait, 1906

Auguste Macke, Window Display, 1912, Oil on canvas.

• Work shows a sense of movement, his reaction to a recent Italian Futurist exhibition he saw that year.

• He experiments with Cubist/Orphist fragmentation of the pictures surface, distorts spaces, and shows multiple perspectives.

• In 1913 he withdraws from the Blaue Reiter group and Kandinsky writing, “My position as a painter is that Kandinsky has passed away peacefully because Delaunay has set up shop next door to him, and because you could really see in him what living colour was, as opposed to an incredibly complicated, and yet absolutely shallow composition based on dashes of colour.”

Auguste Macke, Lady in a Green Jacket, 1913.

Auguste Macke, Promenade, 1913.

• In these works, Macke depicts space while focusing on form and colour. We see repeated rhythms in the compositions --> a sense of movement.

• Creating harmony and balance rather than challenging bourgeois social values.

• His works unique from other Blaue Reiter work because his works are much more figurative

Macke, Girls Bathing with town in background, 1913, Oil on canvas,100x 80cm

Gino Severini, Dynamism of a Dancer. 1912

Auguste Macke, Coloured Forms II, 1913. Oil on cardboard, 36x31cm

Alexij von Jawlensky

Girl in a Grey Apron. 1909.

Lady in a Yellow Straw Hat. 1910.

Variation, 1915

Auguste Macke (1887-1914)Influences: Delaunay and Matisse.(esp. Delaunay’s simultaneous contrasts).

Also interested in Theosophy. “The spiritual connection is in seeing the unified

cosmic connection as being related to the nature of colour, light and human perception”

Emphasis on colour and juxtaposed contrasts through physical activity.

Overall effect gives the viewer a sense of light and illumination.

NKV –group in Munich(Neue Kunsttlerrereinigung) New Artists Group

Splintergroup formed “Der Blaue Reiter” 1911 –never official

Kandinsky, Munter, Macke, Marc, Jawlensky.

Connection: Sense of spirituality.Connections to theosophical thinking.“A purposive contact with the human soul.” –KandinskyExpressive pure coloured forms make it possible to see resonant

vibration of things in human soul.The artist should act as the spirit moves him -”inner necessity”.

Artists seem to be looking for something in nature to respond to.