Der Blaue Reiter
The Der Blaue Reiter movement was a German expressionist art period lasting from 1911 to 1914. The name Der Blaue Reiter was taken from one of Kandinsky’s works, Le Cavalier bleu. The movement was led by Kadinsky, Klee, Marc, and Macke – a group of expressionist artists greatly influenced by the Brucke artists of the previous decade – the Der Blaue Reiter did not believe in the main objective of the Brucke movement (simply focusing on one group of artists). The Der Blaue Reiter artists attempted to find spiritual truths that they felt impressionists had not conveyed. The art movement was not stylistically unified as demonstrated by the range of pure abstractions created by Kadinsky versus the romantic images of Marc. The Der Blaue Reiter believed in changeability, new ideas, and the mixing of different ideas of spirituality and art.
Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Kandinsky's purely abstract works followed a long period of development based on his personal artistic experiences. Fascination and unusual stimulation by color in his childhood, than his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background; he used later in his paintings and reflected in much his early work.
For the most part, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. There are some exceptions: "Sunday, Old Russia (1904)" and "Riding Couple (1907)". Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s was "The Blue Rider (1903)". The type of intentional disjunction applied in this painting, allows viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork would become an increasingly conscious technique used by the artist in subsequent years-culminating in his great "abstract expressionist" works of the 1911-1914. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details.
