On 2nd December 1911 Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter declared their departure from from the New Artists’ Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung) in Munich because Kandinsky in particular felt insufficiently valued by the group. Before the end of the year they had organised their own exhibition: Der Blaue Reiter, the art collective based in Kandinsky and Münter’s home in the southern Bavarian village of Murnau, was born; it came to play a defining role in the development of German Expressionism. The group was remarkably short-lived, however, since it effectively disbanded with the outbreak of the First World War. Two of its founding members, August Macke and Franz Marc, were killed early in the conflict while Kandinsky was forced to return to his native Russia, a move that also ended his relationship with Münter. She would become central to securing the legacy of Der Blaue Reiter, keeping a store of works hidden in Murnau during the turbulent years of National Socialism and the Second World War.

The Lenbachhaus, Munich, today holds the world’s largest collection of Der Blaue Reiter works, thanks largely to gifts and long-term loans from both Münter’s estate and her later partner Johannes Eichner. With the latest rehang of these impressive holdings, which opened to the public in March, the decision was taken to begin the display in 1908, the year that Kandinsky and Münter moved together to Murnau. This has in turn provided the curators of the exhibition under review with an opportunity to consider in more detail the early years in the artists’ relationship and their extensive travels across Europe and North Africa. The resulting display provides a fascinating insight into these crucial years.(1)

Münter and Kandinsky met at the Phalanx art school in Munich in 1902. Barred as a woman from attending the Academy of Arts, Münter arrived at the school as a student; Kandinsky was her teacher. During a class trip to the village of Kochel in the summer of 1902 they became a couple, despite Kandinsky having a wife in Russia. It was perhaps this complicated marital situation and the difficulties of setting up home as an unmarried couple that prompted their extensive travels over the following years. In 1903 they spent some eight weeks in the town of Kallmünz, northeast of Munich; in 1904 a month-long trip to the Netherlands was followed by four months in Tunis, returning to Germany in the spring of 1905 via Palermo, Naples, Florence and Verona. After two months in Dresden during 1905 they spent the winter of 1905–06 on the Italian Riviera. In June 1906 the couple moved to Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris, where they stayed for little over a year.

This exhibition shows the works created on these journeys. Exploring a new location, the couple would take off into the landscape, often on their bicycles, their art materials packed for a day of working outdoors. The results were sketchbooks filled with first impressions and carefully annotated pencil drawings; oil sketches on board or card; and scores of photographs, taken primarily by Münter, capturing both the artists and the motifs that later appeared in their works. Structured broadly chronologically, the exhibition brings together some three hundred of these small-format pieces, which lead the visitor from one destination to the next. From the 1902 trip to Kochel, for example, we see a photograph of Münter with her painting materials (cat. no.30) and Kandinsky riding his bicycle through the Alpine Foothills (no.61; Fig.8). A photograph of a street scene from the trip to Kallmünz in 1903 (no.58) is accompanied by oil sketches by Münter (no.57) and Kandinsky (no.56) depicting the same view. Throughout the galleries, scores of the artists’ sketchbooks are presented in vitrines, their drawings often showing each other at work (nos.4 and 135; Figs.9 and 10). Many of the exhibits, on loan from the Münter archives, are presented for the first time.

It is truly remarkable to see these works – typically reduced to one or two oil studies presented as a mere introduction to Der Blaue Reiter – displayed in such quantities. As the curators set out in the accompanying bilingual (German/English) catalogue, the aim of the exhibition is to move away from evaluating the oil studies solely as the post-Impressionist precursors of Expressionism. Rather, the curators have sought to highlight the range of works produced during these years, their specific characteristics and this significant moment in the history of Europe and European art.

For Münter and Kandinsky, working quickly, en plein air, a practice developed by their Impressionist forerunners, was clearly of great importance. Stylistically too, the Impressionist influences are hard to overlook – as for example in Kandinsky’s Near Starnberg – winter (no.15, Fig.11) or Münter’s Landscape near Rapallo (1906; no.147). Yet the exhibition also succeeds in expanding one’s view to the contexts in which these works were produced. The convergence of old and new media, for example, is brought to the fore in the use of both sketchbooks and photographs to capture a scene. The changing role of women is also highlighted: how this way of working, ‘under the open sky’, allowed Münter to enlarge her artistic horizons beyond the limited training available to her. With the works from Tunisia, such as Kandinsky’s Arabian riders (1905; no.145), the visitor is not only presented with many of the ‘oriental’ motifs that would recur in the works of Der Blaue Reiter. One can also see the ease with which two wealthy Europeans could travel via France to the French protectorate of Tunis and also how increasing mass tourism shaped their experiences, their impressions steered by the sights recommended in their trusted Baedeker guidebook, a copy of which is also exhibited (nos.93–94).

This wonderfully rich exhibition adds new depth to our understanding of the genesis of Der Blaue Reiter and of its influential ideas regarding expression, abstraction and the spiritual. At the same time, it draws our attention to the material contexts in which these ideas were developed, and to the importance of the archive in allowing them to endure.

1. Catalogue: Unter freiem Himmel / Under the Open Sky: Unterwegs mit Gabriele Münter und Wassily Kandinsky (Edition Lenbachhaus 06). Edited by Sarah Louisa Henn and Matthias Mühling. 252 pp. incl. 102 col. + 91 b. & w. ills. (Lenbachhaus Muinch, 2020), €18. ISBN 978–3–88645–205–7.