Word: blaue
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...spreads out across the flaming sky, where flicks of royal blue dance recklessly. A house and garden have become hallucinatory. Expressionism's second group, originally based in Munich, was made up of the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the German Franz Marc and the circle around their one-issue journal, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). As the journal's name hints, this artist group was concerned with the romantic and mystical. The collection's seven paintings by Kandinsky show him unshackling color from objects as he invents abstract art. But before quite doing so, he painted Angel of the Last Judgment...
When Wassily Kandinsky was asked how he and the German painter Franz Marc first came up with the name for their Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), Kandinsky had an amusingly simple explanation: "We both loved blue," he said, "Marc horses and I riders. So the name seemed obvious." The new exhibit at the Busch-Reisinger, Franz Marc: Horses, has perhaps taken its cue from Kandinsky's anecdote. Spotlighting in particular Marc's "Grazing Horses IV (The Red Horses)," the exhibit celebrates a single, simple theme: Marc's love of and fascination with horses. But the effect...
...Looking at these four paintings, you'd hardly guess that World War I was less than two years in the future. This was, in a way, part of Der Blaue Reiter's aim. Unlike the earlier Die Brcke movement, the second wave of prewar Expressionism-Marc, Kandinsky and their collaborators-did not paint the social upheavals of their time. Instead, they attempted to transcend social discord by creating images of other, hypothetical worlds. For Kandinsky, this meant a focus on apocalyptic imagery. And for Marc, of course, there was the natural world...
Joining Walter Gropius' Bauhaus movement initiated a more theoretical phase in Feininger's work and secured his place amongst the greatest artists of the 20th century, though many of his colleagues have over-shadowed him. In 1924 when Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Vier, a reference to his earlier Munich group Der Blaue Reiter, Feininger went with him along with Paul Klee and Alexei von Jawlensky (whose works are also currently on display at the Busch-Reisinger). Teaching and producing with the group brought Feininger from there to the new Dessau Bauhaus and to Berlin where Klee and Kandinsky, in particular...
...exhibition gives plenty of scope to the artists of the Brucke and Blaue Reiter groups (there is a particularly fine sequence of early Kandinskys); but it is strong on artists who belonged to neither, such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose war-induced suicide in 1919 at the age of 38 truncated what might have been one of the great sculptural oeuvres of the 20th century. The best coup is to have reunited the two completed parts of Grosz's blistering anti-establishment triptych of 1926, Eclipse of the Sun and Pillars of Society. The latter, with its beer-hall vision...