Horror lurks in the bright colors of this exciting overview of the group of avant-garde artists Blue Rider, who worked in Munich and the Bavarian Alps in the years before the First World War. Look at Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings of the medieval Bavarian town of Murnau and you might wonder if there is any connection to the film director FW Murnau who made the silent vampire film Nosferatu? Yes – he adopted the town’s name after befriending the Blue Rider artists there. So welcome to the land of ghosts.
For example, Marianne von Werefkin’s eyes are bright red from her self-portrait. Green, yellow and pink compete for dominance of her skin. Her ocher hat with a violet flower collides with a swirling vortex of turquoise and sapphire air. She is an expressionist and there is no doubt about that.
Artists across Europe were using color in a subjective way when Werefkin painted her piercing self-image around 1910. She seems to refer to Henri Matisse’s 1905 painting Woman with a Hat, a subdued portrait of his wife that culminates in a riot of random colors and a kaleidoscopic manifesto for the Fauvist movement. So what makes Werefkin an ‘expressionist’ rather than a ‘fauve’? The eyes have it. The gentle Matisse would never give someone red eyes with lurid implications of possession or Satanism. Werefkin looks positive as Nosferatu.
The Blue Rider artists communicate fear within their skin. The more beautiful their colors, the more nauseating and disturbing. French artist Robert Delaunay appeared at their Munich exhibition in 1911, but his paintings, dutifully included by Tate Modern, show how different modern art looked in Paris and Germany: Delaunay’s rational studies of pure color lack the anguish of the Expressionists around him. it.
You cannot accuse Franz Marc’s Tiger painting of lacking fear. It is the essence of tigerdom, a snarling beast of a photo. The tiger curls its yellow and black body into a jungle of red and blue diamonds as Marc uncorks 100% sample colors and chops them into shape with black stripes.
Marc, one of the wildest-eyed geniuses of this exhibition, would die in the Battle of Verdun in 1916 at the age of 36. You will be convinced that this was the greatest artistic loss of the Great War. His empathy for the animal world is fascinating. In the Rain shows busy Munich with a dog as the most sympathetic protagonist, a bewildered soul on the edge of the human cacophony.
However, that tiger is the most powerful character in the show, a spirit of pure violence. It raises a crucial question about the Expressionists’ relationship to the era of the catastrophe unleashed in 1914 that would lead to Nazism and the Holocaust. Writing in the ashes of 20th century Germany, novelist Thomas Mann, in Dr. Faustus comes close to blaming Expressionism for Nazism.
And sure enough, when you look at Marc’s paintings, you hear the dissonant, shuddering music of the terrible young century. Marc and Kandinsky even went to Munich to listen to the music of the Austrian expressionist Arnold Schoenberg. In a fascinating room, Schoenberg’s revolutionary sound (which inspired Mann’s expressionist composer antihero) provides the soundtrack to Kandinsky’s painting Impression III (Concert). In it, the audience seems to rush onto the stage while reality fades into atonal blue and yellow: there is even something that looks like a machine gun. And if you want to argue that Expressionism is full of premonitions of war and extremism, Kandinsky’s painting Impression Deluge is devastating evidence. Painted in 1913, it suggests that Europeans could already feel in their bones the abyss that would open the following summer. Planets explode, suns die, in frothy fringes of blue fire and hairy tendrils brushing orange, fleshy flowers. Kandinsky loves this apocalypse.
Yet this exhibition opts for a different view of expressionism. Far from a movement of isolated individuals chasing their inner Germanic demons, the Blue Rider was a “transnational” network of artists whose loves and friendships crossed borders and genders. Werefkin was a member of the Russian nobility who moved to Germany to become an artist. Kandinsky was also a Russian. He migrated to Munich in the 1890s to study art, met the artist Gabriele Münter and they lived together in Murnau. The Blue Rider, as this exhibition presents it, was a constellation of women and men revolving around Münter and Kandinsky.
Sometimes it comes across as the Bloomsbury Group with better beer. Münter is the least ‘expressionist’ artist here, if expressionism means being possessed by an inner tiger. Her paintings draw on the social world of the Blue Rider and offer a relaxing glimpse of Bavarian Bohemia. In her loving scene of Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the table, her lover sits in shorts and blue glasses, above the coffee cups in a multi-colored room. What is he on about? The spiritual purpose of art probably.
Kandinsky’s theories about the spiritual in art and his journey towards pure abstraction find a beautiful place in his real world. Freed from lofty monuments of modern art, his canvases become fresh when you watch him experiment. His fantastic 1910 painting The Cow is a delirious transfiguration of the German countryside: a woman milks it for a riotous landscape of church towers and hills, blissfully accepting the crazy yellow spots. Who knew Kandinsky could be funny?
Tate Modern presents the Blue Rider artists as pioneers of the liberal spirit of the Weimar Republic. Werefkin experimented with gender. Kandinsky would work at the Bauhaus school of Weimar.
And yet the most thrilling, deathly quiet moments are when these painters look into a void of horror and Wagnerian grandeur. When Werefkin paints a small church in the German Alps, its reassuring coziness is overshadowed by those icy peaks with their deadly music of the sublime. In expressionism the devil has the best melodies.
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Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider is at Tate Modern, London from April 25 to October 20
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This review was amended on April 23 to correct the title of Kandinsky’s painting The Cow. An earlier version called it Yellow Cow, the title of a painting by Franz Marc from a year later