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AUDIOGUIDE
Adults
CHF/ € 8
Art Club CHF / € 7
Length: 60 minutes
Available at the information desk in the museum
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ALMANAC «DER BLAUE REITER«
«I have a new plan,« Kandinsky announced to Marc on November 19, 1911, referring to the production of a yearbook containing works and articles by a range of artists. The two immediately contacted fellow artists working in every field, requested poets, composers and art historians to contribute, and wrote to museums of Oceanic, Asian and African art. Finally, in 1912, Der Blaue Reiter, was published by Piper-Verlag in Munich, an almanac in which samples of art of every kind, even children’s drawings, appeared side by side and on an equal footing. Initially three variants were printed: a «general edition,« a «de luxe edition,« including two woodcuts tinted and signed by Marc and Kandinsky, and a «museum edition,« issued in ten copies supplemented by an original work by each of the artists involved. Regarding the title, Kandinsky explained, «[...] both of us loved blue, Marc – horses, I – riders.« On the cover, the popular Christian saints George and Martin were united in the figure of the Blue Rider. Woodcuts became Kandinsky’s favored medium for illustrations, because «in them one finds the traces of my development from the 'figurative' to the ‘abstract’.«
The First World War put an abrupt end to the plan of publishing an annual edition of Der Blaue Reiter. While Kandinsky was forced to leave Germany as an «enemy alien,« not returning until 1921, Marc was killed in action in 1916 near Verdun.
«ÜBER DIE FORMFRAGE«
Both the votive image and the initial in Kandinsky’s article «Über die Formfrage« (On the Question of Form) relate to the passage in which he describes the positive, the creative, and goodness in terms of the metaphor of the «white, fertilizing ray.« Hans Arp’s lightning-bolt «Z« obviously relates to the white ray leading from the Virgin to the afflicted man in the votive image, producing its own connection between the levels of image and text.
View the Almanac online (Online LibraryLeicester Arts and Museums Service) (öffnet in neuem Tab)
CATALOGUE "KANDINSKY, MARC UND DER BLAUE REITER"
For just a few years at the beginning of the twentieth century, Munich was the “hot spot“ of Germany‘s artistic avant-garde. Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc’s initiative as founding editors of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a stroke of luck for the arts. The journal and exhibition of the same name made international waves when they heralded the start of the modern era in Germany before the First World War. Since then, the names of the movement’s key players Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, August Macke et al., signal an essential chapter in the international history of art marked by the transition of painting into a vibrant, colorful and transcendental form of abstraction. This beautiful publication that dedicates itself to this topic will show a revolutionary re-valuation of the arts in an open Europe. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-4168-2)
English, 2016
ISBN 978-3-7757-4169-9
Ed. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Ulf Küster, text(s) by Oskar Bätschmann, Andreas Beyer, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Ulf Küster, Marta Ruiz del Árbol, graphic design by Heinz Hiltbrunner