The Blue Rider
Centenary Symposium
25-26 November 2011
Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern
This symposium celebrates the centenary of the first exhibition of The Blue Rider at Galerie Thannhauser
in Munich in December 1911. This two-day event will establish divergent as well as related patterns of
intention, outcome and influence presented under the name Der Blaue Reiter and explore its ongoing
legacies and relevance today.
In collaboration with University of Bristol and Cardiff School of Art and Design
Supported by the British Academy and the Bristol Gallery
25 November
10:30
Welcome by Marko Daniel
10.35
Introduction by Dorothy Rowe and Christopher Short
10.45
Annegret Hoberg Overview of Blaue Reiter
This paper draws an outline about the formation, development and activities of the Blaue Reiter
movement. Beyond the structure of names and facts it points out the main specifics of the group:
In which way it differs from the other artistic groupings of its time, like the German Expressionists
around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, the Cubists around Pablo Picasso and George
Braque, or the Italian Futurists. It points out this difference in the choice for the first Blaue Reiter
exhibition in the Munich Galerie Thannhauser 1911/12, in the content of the Almanach and further
writings of the protagonists, in the afterlife of their ideas and in their works.
11.25
Peter Vergo The Gesamtkunstwerk revisited: shape, form and appearance of the Blaue Reiter
Almanac
Like Jessica Horsley’s contribution that follows, this paper points to Kandinsky’s Russian sources
of inspiration. It suggests that, while Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk was undoubtedly
relevant to the ‘Blue Rider idea’, Kandinsky probably owed what little he knew about Wagner to
the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, editor of the periodical The World of Art, another
important precedent for Der Blaue Reiter.
12.05
Jessica Horsley From Russia with Love: the Blaue Reiter Almanac and Studiia Impressionistov
This paper establishes Studiia Impressionistov as the single most important precedent for Der
Blaue Reiter by examining the significant interconnections between the contributors and
contributions to the two publications; comparing their structure, situating them in the perspective of
periodical publications; and rooting the debate in its cultural and scholarly contexts.
12.30
Panel discussion and Q&A
12.55
Break
13.55
Claudia Delank Der Blaue Reiter and Japanese Art
As Der Blaue Reiter was a global project encompassing a variety of art forms from different
cultures on an international scale it is especially interesting that the leading artists of the group
have extensively collected Japanese art. This paper will discuss the influence of Japanese art on
Franz Marc, August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky based on new research. What did the artist
select from Japanese art? How did Japanese art help them in the process of to formulate their
abstract art? In what way did Japanese art serve as a role model? The presentation addresses the
key role of Japanese art for the painters of Der Blaue Reiter in their search for the lost unity
between life and the world.
14.20
Katherine Kuenzli The Primitive and the Modern in Der Blaue Reiter and the Folkwang Museum
This paper examines intersections between Der Blaue Reiter and the Folkwang Museum, one
venue for the group’s 1912 exhibition. Founded by Karl Ernst Osthaus and designed by Henry van
de Velde in 1902, the Folkwang was the first and only museum before 1914 to display modern and
‘primitive’ works alongside each other. The Folkwang Museum provides an important context for
Der Blaue Reiter’s assertion that modernist and ‘primitive’ art sprang from a common spiritual
impulse.
14.45
Christian Weikop The ‘Savages’ of Germany: A Reassessment of Brücke and Blauer Reiter
15.10
Panel discussion and Q&A
15.35
Tea break
15.50
Mercedes Valdivieso Horsewomen at Der Blaue Reiter?
The purpose of this presentation is to show the participation of several women in Der Blaue Reiter,
not only as artists (Gabriele Münter, Elisabeth Epstein, Marianne Werefkin, Natalia Gontscharova,
Maria Marc), but also as providing support, whether ideological, logistical or financial. To these we
must add the contributions of Emmy Worringer and Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke, who, although they
were not artists, helped to realize the projects of Der Blaue Reiter.
16.15
Nathan Timpano Feeling Blue: Der Blaue Reiter at the Tate Gallery, circa 1960
In 1960, Tate launched a retrospective exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter, which, according to the
contemporary press, was a failed endeavour. One critic derided the show for being too
intellectually minded, and suggested that this German movement was only historically – and not
artistically – significant. This paper alternatively proposes that the non-unified aesthetic of Der
Blaue Reiter was the catalyst for the exhibition’s non-laudatory reception, given that it defied
traditional, curatorial practices.
16.40
Shulamith Behr Female artistic identity and creativity in the Blaue Reiter
Although women artists were welcome in the two exhibitions of the ‘Editors of the Blaue Reiter’,
their role is regarded as peripheral to the centrality of Kandinsky’s and Marc’s collaborative
enterprise. But does this necessarily mean that Gabriele Münter was merely spectator to this new
and evolving male artistic partnership or did the Blaue Reiter exhibitions harbour the staging of
more complex notions of gendered authorship and agency? Certainly, in 1913, the notion of a
‘blaue Reiterreiterin' was entertained in the correspondence between the poet and writer Else
Lasker-Schüler and Marianne Werefkin. Used as a metaphor, the term suggests the integration of
the rider and horsewoman, Werefkin being addressed as both ‘wilder Junge’ and ‘süsse Malerin’.
This paper aims to go beyond stereotypical categories of binary thinking about the nature of
masculinity and femininity in exploring women artists’ positioning in this avant-garde group.
17.05
Panel discussion and Q&A
17.30
Drinks in the Starr Auditorium Foyer
26 November
10:30
Introduction
10.35
Grahame Weinbren Kandinsky: A Close Look (2009)
Commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum for the 2009-2010 Kandinsky retrospective, this film
focuses on three paintings from 1913. A different approach is taken toward each: Painting with
White Border starts with Kandinsky's essay discussing the painting, Small Pleasures uses
eyetracking to investigate how viewers actually look at the work, and for Black Lines composer Dean
Drummond was commissioned to write a score using the colour-sound connections proposed by
Kandinsky.
11.15
Debbie Lewer Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich and Zurich: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada
This paper examines the connections between Der Blaue Reiter in Munich and Dada in Zurich in
1916-17. It appraises the significance of Kandinsky for Hugo Ball’s thinking about art. It explores
how both the Blaue Reiter and early Dada aspired to a synthesis of Kleinkunst and
Gesamtkunstwerk. Finally, it considers aspects of the ‘failure’ of Dada in Zurich on its original terms.
11.40
Annie Bourneuf Letters and Things: Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin on Language and
Perception
This paper explores how Wassily Kandinsky's writings provoked Walter Benjamin to rethink the
relation between language and perception. Benjamin's philosophy of language draws on the
procedures Kandinsky proposes in Der Blaue Reiter and elsewhere for defamiliarizing words –for
perceiving them as if they were incomprehensible. However, whereas Kandinsky argues for the
expressive power of the visual shape of written language, Benjamin sees the word's ‘skeleton’ as
expressionless in the extreme.
12.05
Colin Rhodes The Great Realism, or how the Blue Rider Almanac invented Self-Taught Art
12.30
Panel discussion and Q&A
12.55
Break
13.55
Stelarc THE SOUND OF SKIN: YELLOW AVATAR / BLUE SKY.
A performance in Second Life using a Kinect interface that allows the actuation and animation of an
avatar using the body’s gestures and postures in a virtual space of interactive objects and colors.
Choreographing the movements and collisions of the avatar composes the sounds of the
performance. There is a an acoustical counterpoint between the physical body and its virtual flesh.
14.35
Gregory Zinman Machines that Make Yellow Sounds: The Legacy of Kandinsky’s Light
15.00
Tea break
15.25
Sarah McGavran Die Tunisreise: The Legacy of Der Blaue Reiter in the Art of Paul Klee and Nacer
Khemir
Der Blaue Reiter’s emphasis on intercultural exchange shaped Klee’s engagement with the arts of
Tunisia and determined his legacy for Tunisian artist and filmmaker Khemir. In ‘Die Tunisreise,’ his
2007 collaboration with Swiss director Bruno Moll, Khemir retraces Klee’s travels. For Khemir, Klee’s
Tunisian watercolors reconcile Islamic and modernist abstraction and provide alternate views to
popular representations of Islam.
15.50
Rose-Carol Washton Long Is the Blaue Reiter relevant for the Twenty-First Century?
The Blaue Reiter has been characterized as remote from everyday life and political concerns. I plan
to counter these claims and demonstrate how anarchist strategies of shock to free society from
entrenched rules emboldened Kandinsky and Marc to promote and display multiple types of
dissonance. Their work, in this regard, makes them relevant yet again to contemporary practices.
16.15
Panel discussion and Q&A
16.55
Closing Remarks
17.00
Yellow Sound performance