Kandinsky and Expressionist Painting before World War I

The work of Post-Impressionists, such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and the Cubists in Paris, all informed the development of Expressionist art in the years immediately preceding World War I. The practitioners of this style, largely working and exhibiting in Germany, crossed paths via various associations and were also deeply influenced by their encounters with Japanese and African art, as well as Germanic folk art. From Vasily Kandinsky to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, artists who came to be associated with Expressionism sought to convey the communicative force of color through vibrantly hued canvases and bold forms.

Kandinsky, an artist who has been closely linked to the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and to whom this gallery is dedicated, became a leading theoretician on chromatic symbolism after arriving in Munich from his native Russia at the turn of the century. Kandinsky’s color theories, as outlined in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), were echoed by Franz Marc and Alexej Jawlensky, among others. Marc first met Kandinsky and Jawlensky when he joined the New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München or NKVM) in 1911. At this time, Marc was exclusively depicting animals in nature and endowing his colors with expressive value and symbolic meaning in a manner similar to Kandinsky in his Bavarian landscapes. Meanwhile, Matisse’s 1910 Munich exhibition had left a strong impression on both Jawlensky and Kandinsky. The two shared an affinity for Matisse’s brilliant canvases and those of the other Fauves—works Kandinsky had had the opportunity to observe during his visit to Paris in 1906–7.

In 1911, Kandinsky and Marc formed The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group along with Jawlensky, Paul Klee, and other members of the German avant-garde. The premier exhibition of this group took place that December at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie and included Marc’s monumental Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh) (1911). Two months after the first showing, the Berlin Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, led by Kirchner, was invited to participate in a second Blue Rider exhibition. Kirchner and the other members of Die Brücke frequently employed dissonant color patterns and angular stylizations to increase the intensity of their paintings. Furthermore, Marc Chagall, who had been working in Paris beginning in 1910, received his first solo show in 1914 at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, thus forming a link with both Die Brücke and Blue Rider artists and exposing them to his imaginative, colorful works.

The connections among these different artists were severed with the 1914 outbreak of World War I. Nonetheless, the postwar period saw the reunion of Kandinsky, Klee, and Jawlensky, who together with Lyonel Feininger, formed the Blue Four group in the United States. It was then that these artists were able to pursue their color theories with renewed vigor.

—Megan Fontanella, Curatorial Assistant