The publicist Franz Röthel in 1956 described it with appropriate expressiveness:
In the intoxicating colourfulness… it is like an ostentatious rattling of weapons. Threateningly, the large colour monsters crash into each other. Along the edges, winding curves size up the enemy. Flashing, fencing foil thrusts seemingly shine alight the sharp, melee of cutting forms.
Franz Marc became a soldier in World War I and was killed in action by 1916. Despite the short creative phase of his life, he bequeathed unto us the message of his vision contained in his wonderful paintings. It is an expressive message of the harmony of all existence and of unity with nature, urgently speaking to all living things. Franz Marc wrote to his wife from the war, ‘It is precisely the pure art that has no purpose, but is simply a symbolic act of creation, proud in and of itself.’ The Nazis had to remove his paintings from the Entartete Kunst exhibit, because the visitors stood in front of them too reverently.
Wassily Kandinsky seized upon this period of creativity with his whole personality and gave art an intellectual impetus with his research into the theoretical and methodological relationships between existence and art. His genius was to transform this period of creativity with new knowledge, thinking, and feeling. His worldview was shaped by German poetic Symbolism, by Stefan George, by the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and Henri Bergson, by theosophy and anthropology and insight into the natural sciences, as well as by the changed conceptions of space and time. He was interested in Indian meditation and in his library there were works on breathing techniques, occult healing, and colour therapy.
His tendency towards the intellectual in art and his search for infinite and cosmic energy became the rationale for him to overcome the representational and to embrace the non-representational. He found new and unexplored worlds of intellectual renewal – something no artist before him had dared to do. This path led him to the discovery of object-forms and, eventually, to image elements that, in encrypted form, convey intellectual meaning. In his later and more mature style, cosmic existence and its diversity become noticeable. With the aid of his intuition, he attempted to convey the thoughts and secrets of the cosmos in mystical, yet at the same time, rational paintings full of colour and drama.
His very first encounter with the avant-garde was in 1898, when he saw the painting Haystacks at an exhibition of Claude Monet. In his autobiography he reported:
I was struck dumb that this painting was missing an object, and then I noticed with surprise and bewilderment that not only is the painting gripping, but it makes an indelible impact. This was the unimagined and, up until then, hidden power of the paint palette that went beyond my dreams. Painting was given a magical power and splendour.
Since then, Kandinsky was on the search for the secret that was hidden between art and nature. His first non-representational watercolour is thought to have been created in 1910, but it was probably not created until 1913. This, however, does not do anything to negate Kandinsky’s intellectual and methodological achievement. The first results of his non-representational painting were displays of lively and luminous colour. Lines criss-cross each other forcefully or fall down together in one direction. This apparent chaos obeyed the inherent order to visually capture the forces of the cosmos. In 1912 he exhibited at the Sturm in Berlin, and, in 1913, Herwarth Walden published a Kandinsky catalogue. After the outbreak of World War I, he moved to Switzerland and returned via Scandinavia to Moscow. There, he was assigned official posts and a professorship. However, in 1921 he returned to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus Weimar and later in Dessau. Together with Klee, Feininger and Jawlensky, he founded the Die Blauen Vier (The Blue Four) group, which lasted until it was disbanded in 1933. In 1933 Wassily Kandinsky left for to Paris and in 1937 the Nazis confiscated his paintings.
In this writings About the Intellectual in Art, written in 1910 and published in 1912, he made public his findings regarding colours and shapes and their inherent values. Similar to a musical score, he sought to produce a score for painting.
Yellow is the typical earthly colour. Yellow cannot be driven very far into the depths. When cooled off with blue, it obtains a… sickly hue. In comparison with the frame of mind of a person, it could function as the colour equivalent of insanity.
The corresponding shape is the triangle. White acts ‘as a great silence’, black sounds ‘as a dead nothing after the sun has been extinguished’, gray is ‘toneless and immoveable’, vermillion is ‘as an evenly glowing passion.’ He also assigns character and mood to shapes. Blue is the colour of the circle, and the circle represents perfection; the domed half circle represents peace. A horizontal line represents peace; pointing upwards it represents joy, and pointing downwards mourning. In the course of his life as a painter, he developed a vocabulary of symbols and colours. His paints become a script with rhythms and rules. ‘Composition is a combination of coloured and graphic shapes,’ said Kandinsky. There is no hierarchy of methods. The order within the composition is subject to the control of the intellect. However, the origin of the action would be an ‘inner necessity.’ In the later paintings, Kandinsky developed a language of small particles. Biomorphic, fantastic creatures float and interact in cosmic worlds. He formulated his visions with playful cheerfulness, which had a hint of the surreal.
His encounter with Henri Matisse led Alexej von Jawlensky to his compositions of big radiating spots of colour that he, unlike Matisse, surrounded with broad-brush strokes. Jawlensky radically renewed the use of the human image as a subject for painting in the first half of the 20th century. With imperturbable resolution, he took the image from the splendid vibrancy of Expressionism and transformed it into a constructivist abstraction. The impact of World War I, made his form of expression increasingly intellectual. This resulted in internalised, symbolic Meditation panels.
Even in her youth, Marianne von Werefkin was called the ‘Russian Rembrandt.’ Later in Munich, she became the intellectual centre of the Blaue Reiter. Painters like Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Jawlensky and Kandinsky valued her innovative spirit and her broad artistic view. For 30 years she lived and worked together with Alexej von Jawlensky, encouraging his talent, first in St Petersburg and then in Munich. From 1907 she produced a great many paintings which serve as a testament to the great significance of her art at the beginning of the 20th century. Circus (Before the Show) from 1909–1910 is one of her masterpieces. The composition stylistically moves between Art Nouveau and Expressionism. On the one hand, the painting shows the influences of French painting, and, on the other side, a daring use of colour, and, in the use of the surfaces, a concept of abstract compositional structures. Long drawn surfaces in various colours and patterns divide the painting.
The work by Gabriele Münter shows lively, fresh colours and a powerful organisation of space. In the early Murnau years, she produced landscapes and still lifes.
Alexej von Jawlensky, Portrait of the dancer Alexander Sakharov, 1909.
Oil on cardboard, 69.5 × 66.5 cm. Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Wassily Kandinsky, Amazon, 1918.
Paint on glass, 32 × 25 cm. Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913.
Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm. Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.
Gabriele Münter, Jawlensky and Werefkin, 1908–09.
Oil on canvas, 32.7 × 44.5 cm. Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Marianne von Werefkin, Circus (Before the Show), c. 1910.
Gouache, 55 × 90 cm. Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren.
Until 1918, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka defined the art scene in Vienna. There, all the political, social, and artistic trends