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