HARD-EDGE

    Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Pop Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.

The term was coined by writer, curator and Los Angeles Times art critic Jules Langsner, along with Peter Selz, in 1959, to describe the work of painters from California, who, in their reaction to the more painterly or gestural forms of Abstract expressionism, adopted a knowingly impersonal paint application and delineated areas of color with particular sharpness and clarity. This approach to abstract painting became widespread in the 1960s, though California was its creative center.

Other, earlier, movements, or styles have also contained the quality of hard-edgedness, for instance the Precisionists also displayed this quality to a great degree in their work. Hard-edge can be seen to be associated with one or more school of painting, but is also a generally descriptive term, for these qualities found in any painting. Hard-edged painting can be both figurative or nonrepresentational.

In the late 1950s, Langsner and Peter Selz, then professor at the Claremont Colleges, observed a common link among the recent work of John McLaughlin (1898–1976), Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) and Feitelson's wife Helen Lundeberg. The group of seven gathered at the Feitelson's home to discuss a group exhibition of this nonfigurative painting style. Curated by Langsner, Four Abstract Classicists opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1959. Helen Lundeberg was not included in the exhibit. These painters were featured in a touring exhibition during 2008 called "The Birth of the Cool" in California museums along with midcentury design, music and film.

Four Abstract Classicists was subtitled California Hard-edge by British art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway when it traveled to England and Ireland. The term came into broader use after Alloway used it to describe contemporary American geometric abstract painting featuring "economy of form," "fullness of color," "neatness of surface," and the nonrelational arrangement of forms on the canvas.

In 1964, a second major hard-edge exhibition curated by Jules Langsner was held at the Pavilion Gallery in Balboa, CA (also known as the Newport Pavilion) with the cooperation of the Ankrum Gallery, Esther Robles Gallery, Felix Landau Gallery, Ferus Gallery and Heritage Gallery of Los Angeles. This was called, simply, California Hard-edge painting. Included in this show were Florence Arnold, John Barbour, Larry Bell, Karl Benjamin, John Coplans, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Helen Lundeberg, John McLaughlin, and Dorothy Waldman.

In 2000, Tobey C. Moss curated Four Abstract Classicists Plus One at her gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibit again featured John McLaughlin, Feitelson, Hammersley, and Benjamin, and added Lundeberg as the fifth of the original Hard-edge painters. In 2003, Louis Stern Fine Arts showed a retrospective exhibition for Lorser Feitelson entitled Lorser Feitelson and the invention of Hard-edge painting, 1945-1965. The same year, NOHO MODERN showed the works of June Harwood in an exhibition entitled June Harwood: Hard-edge painting Revisited, 1959-1969. Art critic Dave Hickey solidified the place of these 6 artists in: The Los Angeles School: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Helen Lundeberg, and John McLaughlin. The exhibition was held at the Ben Maltz Gallery of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 2004-2005.

This style of hard-edge geometric abstraction recalls the earlier work of Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian. Other artists associated with Hard-edge painting include Herb Aach, Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Max Bill, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ralph Coburn, Nassos Daphnis, Ronald Davis, Gene Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Peter Halley, Al Held, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Günther C. Kirchberger, Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland, Georg Karl Pfahler, Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Ludwig Sander, Leon Polk Smith, Julian Stanczak, Frank Stella, Myron Stout, Leo Valledor, Victor Vasarely, Charmion von Wiegand, Neil Williams, Larry Zox and Barbro Östlihn.

                           POP ART

     In London, in 1952, a group of artists calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting regularly to discuss topics such as mass culture's place in fine art, the found object, and science and technology; members included Edouardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. Britain in the early 1950s was still emerging from the austerity of the post-war years, and so its outlook on popular culture coming from America was ambivalent. While the group was suspicious of its commercial character, they were enthusiastic about the rich world pop culture seemed to promise for the future. The imagery they discussed at length included that found in Western movies, science fiction, comic books, billboards, automobile design and rock n' roll music.

The actual term "Pop art" has several possible origins: the first use of the term in print has been attributed to both Lawrence Alloway and Alison and Peter Smithson, while the first artwork to incorporate the word 'Pop' is said to have been produced by Paolozzi. His collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) contained cut-up images of a pinup girl, Coca-Cola logo, cherry pie, World War II fighter plane, and a man's hand holding a pistol, out of which burst the world 'POP!' in a puffy white cloud.

The now classic New York Pop art of Warhol and Lichtenstein emerged suddenly in 1960, but it was importantly prefigured some years before in the Neo-Dada work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. By the mid 1950s, Johns was already troubling the conventions of Abstract Expressionism with abstract paintings that included references to, as Johns put it, "things the mind already knows" - targets, flags, hand-prints, letters and numbers. Meanwhile, Rauschenberg's Combines incorporated found objects and screen-printed photographs.

The French equivalent of Pop art was Nouveau Réalisme, a movement launched by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960. Although it would echo the American's concerns with commercial culture, most of the French artists were more concerned with sculpture than with imagery. Closer to the American model of image-based Pop was the work of German artist Sigmar Polke who, in a manner similar to that of Lichtenstein and Warhol, explored the expressive possibilities of mechanical reproduction.

It is a notable characteristic of the Pop movement that many of its most important figures would have close involvement with commercial art: Ed Ruscha first supported himself as a graphic designer, while James Rosenquist had a spell as a billboard painter. But Andy Warhol was by far the most successful in commercial art and had established a formidable reputation in New York before he ever turned to fine art. The critic Hal Foster has anatomized Pop art as consisting of essentially five different image types, each of which is preoccupied with a slightly different problem, and each of which has been importantly influential on subsequent artists. The first he locates in the 'tabular' images of Richard Hamilton that were influenced by the collages of Edouardo Paolozzi and others in the Independent Group. Hamilton arranged his motifs on the canvas in a loose fashion and he exploited the lush quality of paint to emphasize the analogies he drew between designed products like cars, and fragments of women's bodies - analogies which were typical of contemporary advertising.

Another type of image typical of Pop, Foster argues, is that epitomized by the screened images of Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein proved that he could fulfill demands for a great picture even though his subject matter derived from popular art: his images delivered the instantaneous punch of good art; they used expressive and abstract forms and the compositions were powerfully unified.

The third image type that Foster identified is best exemplified by the imagery of trauma, death and disaster in the work of Andy Warhol. Some have argued that pictures like White Burning Car, III (1963), with its repeated images of a smoking car wreck, suggest a cold disinterest in the subject matter - as if the repetitions of the mass media had blunted the artists' ability to process emotion. Others have argued the contrary; such images point to Warhol's interest in the horrors of contemporary life. Foster has suggested, instead, that Warhol employed repetition precisely to register trauma - like a horrific image that returns to haunt again and again.

Foster locates a fourth image type in Gerhard Richter's marriage of photography and painting. Instead of leveling the high and the low, Richter's art seems to draw on the vast range of photographs that we encounter every day, to the point of suggesting that nothing can be seen clearly any more without the influence of the photographic image. As in Warhol's work, the suggestion of trauma and death is present in these coldly rendered photographs, but Richter introduces blurs and smears of paint which remind one that these are not photographs we are looking at, but paintings which lie in a grand tradition which has always aspired to memorialize the past. If the photographs represent the threat of forgetting, the sorrow of time lost, the paintings hold out the hope that these memories could be sealed in - painting, in other words, might still have a purpose in the modern world, in preserving memory.

Finally, Foster points to the importance of Ed Ruscha in developing an imagery that responded to the visual landscape of Los Angeles. Ruscha borrowed motifs from commercial art in a similar manner to his colleagues on the East Coast, and often drew analogies between the effects of those motifs and those of high abstract art. Yet Ruscha also learnt much from cinema, and much of his imagery might be said to be reminiscent of the cinematic image, a space that is, as Foster puts it, "at once deep and superficial, illusionist and flat: in the movies space is surface and vice versa and the words (as in credits and subtitles) can appear in the same register as the images."

               POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

  In 1964, critic Clement Greenberg was recruited by the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA) to curate an exhibition devoted to young abstractionists. He was a natural choice to curate such a show, as by the late 1950s he had a prominent reputation as a defender of contemporary abstract art. Greenberg called the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, although in the essay he wrote for the exhibition catalog he never actually referred to the style by name. Instead, he defined it by what it was not - "painterly abstraction," or the style of the Abstract Expressionists.

Greenberg selected several east coast-based artists whose work he was already familiar with, such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. As for the Bay Area artists, such as John Ferren and Sam Francis, debate continues as to who exactly selected them for the exhibition. While some credit James Elliott, a curator at the L.A. County Museum, the original exhibition catalog indicated that Greenberg was taken to see several works in California by Fred Martin of the San Francisco Art Association.

There was a total a thirty-one artists selected for Post-Painterly Abstraction, and each of them was represented by three paintings apiece, most of which were made between 1960 and 1964. All of the artists were either natives of the USA or Canada.

Greenberg borrowed from the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in devising the term post-painterly abstraction. Wolfflin had popularized the term "painterly" to describe characteristics of the Baroque, which separated it from classical, or Renaissance art. Greenberg believed that abstract painting had evolved amidst a trend towards "painterly" painting, but had swung back towards cleaner composition and sharper forms in the 1920s and 1930s, under the influence of Mondrian, Synthetic Cubism, and the Bauhaus. Abstract Expressionism marked another swing towards the painterly, and the inevitable reaction against it was away from it once again - though Greenberg emphasized that post-painterly abstraction was not a return to the past.

Although many artists associated with the tendency worked with clean lines and clearly defined forms (such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Al Held), others explored softer forms. Helen Frankenthaler, for example, became well known for soaking paint into untreated canvas, which created a visual effect of color opening up the canvas. Rather than working up the paint into a rich texture on the surface of the canvas, as many artists of the previous generation had done, she allowed paint to seep into the canvas itself, creating a vibrant and utterly flat visual plane. Other post-painterly artists, such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, picked up on Frankenthaler's soaking technique to create a variety of color field paintings of their own unique design.

                    ABSTRACT EXPESSIONISM    

  A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists' desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse, Léger, and Picasso, among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. The German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics.

The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man's dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The  Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

                      PITTURA METAFISICA

Pittura Metafisica (Ital. for "metaphysic painting") denotes a style that came up in Italy as early as in 1911/12, lasting up into the 1920s. The term originates from the main master and founding father of Pittura Metafisica, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Artists such as Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) followed his example around 1917/18.

A fundamental feature of the Pittura Metafisica, in its literal sense, is the depiction of the object's "super-natural" features (Greek "metá" = beyond; "phýsis" = nature), the object's content beyond its visible features. These ideas had clearly been influenced by Giorgio de Chirico's younger brother Andrea, who was working as a writer and painter under the pseudonym Alberto Savinio. Philosophical concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer also occupied fundamental roles in this context.

The painters of the Pittura Metafisica created coulisse-like and perspectively exaggerated views that seemed like dreams filled with over-sharply modeled figures and objects, which have been taken from their original contexts and rearranged in new and strange relations. Man is also treated as an object - as "manichino", a faceless jointed doll, or as a construct of stereometric basic forms. Isolation, alienation, inexplicability and mysteriousness coin the atmosphere of the calm, motionless Pittura Metafisica that wanted to be less a way of painting than a means of observing.

In their concept of materiality, but also in terms of style, the artists of the Pittura Metafisica referred to the solemn and strict austerity of the Early Renaissance (Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello). The simultaneosuly upcoming dynamic Futurism can be perceived as a counter movement to the Pittura Metafisica - Carlo Carrà, up until 1915 one of the leading artists of Futurism, explained his turn to the Pittura Metafisica with the rediscovery of the "principio italiano", which was prevailing in Renaissance.

The Pittura Metafisica had effects beyond the borders of Italy, especially on New Oobjectivity and Surrealism, which both came up up a little later.

                      DADA    

Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe at a time when the horror of World War I was being played out in what amounted to citizens' front yards. Due to the war, a number of artists, writers and intellectuals - notably of French and German nationality - found themselves congregating in the refuge that Zurich (in neutral Switzerland) offered. Far from merely feeling relief at their respective escapes, this bunch was pretty ticked off that modern European society would allow the war to have happened. They were so angry, in fact, that they undertook the time-honored artistic tradition of protesting.

Banding together in a loosely-knit group, these writers and artists used any public forum they could find to (metaphorically) spit on nationalism, rationalism, materialism and any other -ism which they felt had contributed to a senseless war. In other words, the Dadaists were fed up. If society is going in this direction, they said, we'll have no part of it or its traditions. Including...no, wait!...especially artistic traditions. We, who are non-artists, will create non-art - since art (and everything else in the world) has no meaning, anyway.

About the only thing these non-artists all had in common were their ideals. They even had a hard time agreeing on a name for their project. "Dada" - which some say means "hobby horse" in French and others feel is just baby talk - was the catch-phrase that made the least amount of sense, so "Dada" it was.

Using an early form of Shock Art, the Dadaists thrust mild obscenities, scatological humor, visual puns and everyday objects (renamed as "art") into the public eye. Marcel Duchamp performed the most notable outrages by painting a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa (and scribbling an obscenity beneath) and proudly displaying his sculpture entitled Fountain (which was actually a urinal, sans plumbing, to which he added a fake signature).

The public, of course, was revulsed - which the Dadaists found wildly encouraging. Enthusiasm being contagious, the (non)movement spread from Zurich to other parts of Europe and New York City. And just as mainstream artists were giving it serious consideration, in the early 1920s, Dada (true to form) dissolved itself.

In an interesting twist, this art of protest - based on a serious underlying principle - is delightful. The nonsense factor rings true. Dada art is whimsical, colorful, wittily sarcastic and, at times, downright silly. If one wasn't aware that there was, indeed, a rationale behind Dadaism, it would be fun to speculate as to just what these gentlemen were "on" when they created these pieces.

ada began in Zurich and became an international movement. Or non-movement, as it were.

Dada had only one rule: Never follow any known rules.

Dada was intended to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer (typically shock or outrage). If its art failed to offend traditionalists, Dada writing - particularly Tristan Tzara's manifestoes - proved a fine, nose-thumbing Plan B.

Dada art is nonsensical to the point of whimsy. Almost all of the people who created it were ferociously serious, though.

Abstraction and Expressionism were the main influences on Dada, followed by Cubism and, to a lesser extent, Futurism.

There was no predominant medium in Dadaist art. All things from geometric tapestries to glass to plaster and wooden reliefs were fair game. It's worth noting, though, that assemblage, collage, photomontage and the use of ready made objects all gained wide acceptance due to their use in Dada art.

For something that supposedly meant nothing, Dada certainly created a lot of offshoots. In addition to spawning numerous literary journals, Dada influenced many concurrent trends in the visual arts (especially in the case of Constructivism). The best-known movement Dada was directly responsible for is Surrealism.

Dada self-destructed when it was in danger of becoming "acceptable".

                    SYNCHROMISM

   Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their abstract "synchromies", based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention. Synchromism is based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that by painting in color scales, their work could evoke musical sensations. It became abstract and expressive, hoping to unite visual and auditory stimuli through a symphony of color. This phenomenon of 'hearing' a color or the pairing of two or more senses--synesthesia--was also central to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, who was developing his own synesthetic paintings, or 'compositions', in Europe around the same time

The abstract "synchromies" are based on color scales, using rhythmic color forms with advancing and reducing hues. They typically have a central vortex and explode in complex color harmonies. The Synchromists avoided using atmospheric perspective or line, relying solely on color and shape to express form

The earliest synchromist works were similar to Fauvist paintings. The multicolored shapes of synchromist paintings also resembled those found in orphism. MacDonald-Wright insisted, however, that Synchromism was a unique art form, and "has nothing to do with orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of synchromism ... would realize that we poked fun at orphism"

Synchromism was developed by Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell while they were studying in Paris during the early 1910s. From 1911 to 1913, they studied under the Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, whose color theory connected qualities of color to qualities of music, such as tone to hue and intensity to saturation. Also influential upon MacDonald-Wright and Russell were the paintings of the Impressionists, Cézanne, and Matisse, which heavily emphasized color. Russell coined the term "synchromism" in 1912, in an express attempt to convey the linkage of painting and music.

       SECTION D'OR

   The year 1912 marked the passage from Analytic Cubism to Synthetic Cubism and witnessed the movement's widespread propagation. Gleizes and Metzinger published the first doctrinal work devoted to the new movement. In the course of the autumn, the historic exhibition of the Section d'Or at the La Boétie Gallery in Paris gathered together in one vast collection all Cubism's adherents -- with the sole exception of its two creators, Braque and Picasso, who showed their works only at the Kahnweiler Gallery. The exhibition included not only Juan Gris, Léger, Gleizes, Metzinger, Lhote, Delaunay, Marcoussis and Roger de La Fresnaye, but also Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Dumont, and Agero. Many of these painters retained only the superficial appearance of Cubism, the geometrical fragmentation of the painted surface, and later turned in opposite directions, some going back to traditional formulae, while others were borne away by abstract currents or Dada experiments, but the unity of their search was based on a common admiration for Cézanne and his constructive lesson. The initiative and the title of this exhibition, which created a considerable stir, were due to the painter and engraver Jacques Villon. In his studio at Puteaux, near Paris, a number of artists passionately interested in problems of rhythm and proportion met on Sunday afternoons, among them the two theoreticians of Cubism, Gleizes and Metzinger, Picabia, Léger La Fresnaye, as well as the poets Paul Fort, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jean Cocteau and Joachim Gasquet. Villon developed his theory of vision by pyramids, taken from Leonardo da Vinci, and suggested during these meetings the title of 'Section d'Or', borrowed from the treatise of the Bolognese monk Luca Pacioli, The Divine Proportion, published in Venice in 1509 and illustrated by Leonardo himself. Formulated by Vitruvius and taken up again during the Renaissance, the golden section or divine proportion (or gate of harmony) is the ideal relation between two magnitudes, expressed numerically as and demonstrated in many masterpieces of different arts, applied consciously or, more often, by instinct. 'There is,' Voltaire said, 'a hidden geometry in all the arts that the hand produces.' Although the golden section was not the only constant to which the Cubists referred for the mathematical organization of their canvas, it reflected the profound need for order and measure that they felt more through sensibility and reason than as a result of calculation. Distorted by the incomprehension or bad faith of critics, the 'Section d'Or' exhibition met with immense avant-garde success in France and abroad, and constituted a general rally under the sign of Cézannian architecture and geometrical discipline.

                               DER BLAUE REITER

    Located in a small village just outside of Munich, Munchen, the southern German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, was broader in scope and more sophisticated than Die Brücke. Der Blaue Reiter was a more international group, with a more amorphous and changing membership.  They were more ideological and more concerned with changing the world than Die Brücke.  The group was more diverse in national backgrounds but was bound together by common ideals.  Although these artists never developed a common style, theirs was a formal aesthetic, based upon the new formal possibilities of plane and line, creating a stylized natural form. The Die Brücke artists were more individualistic, refused leadership and resented Kirchner’s attempts to be the group’s spokesperson. But like Fauvism, this group was largely focused around one artist: Vassily (Wassily) Kandinsky (1866-1944), the dominant figure of Der Blaue Reiter.  He was most closely associated with Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) and Franz (Frantsem) Marc (1890-1916); and with Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941) and Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938).  This group was later joined by Auguste Macke and the young Paul Klee.

   The northern group was not in contact with Der Blaue Reiter in Munich (and Munich area) until 1911-1912, when Franz Marc visited Berlin. The two groups began and developed independently.  What they shared in common was the journey thorough and away from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Art nouveau.  Although Der Blaue Reiter was ultimately more influenced by Jugdenstil ideals which were still current in Munich, both groups had precedents in late Nineteenth Century German landscape schools at Worpeswede in the north and Dachau in the south, where artistic colonies and groups were established.  Likewise, Der Blaue Reiter was interested in “primitive” sculpture as part of “quest for origins” and for alternatives to the outdated styles of the fin-de-siecle.  These artists also interested in the art of children, art of the insane, naïve painting, all of this art came from untrained people.  The Der Blaue Reiter artists, like most artists of their time had received traditional art training and were imbued with conventions.  They needed to purify and to do that they had to get back to basics, whether it be the countryside or art making, and live in a small independent community.

   By 1903, Kandinsky and Münter had moved from Munich, then the capital of art in Germany, to a small town in the country, Mürnau.  Notice that the concept of the isolated art community was a German one.   French artists may have vacationed in seaside towns, but they spent most of their careers in Paris, the capital of the art world.  There was nothing like Paris in Russia, only Moscow, which offered limited opportunities for an ­avant-garde artist in the late Nineteenth Century.  Unsurprisingly, Kandinsky and all the Russians, Jawlensky and von Werefkin, were in Munich by 1896, joined later by Paul Klee and Franz Marc before 1900.  His little group complete, in 1901, Kandinsky founded Phalanx, a school of painting, but, due to a lack of a clear concept, it disbanded in 1904.  Between 1904 and 1908, Kandinsky was in Sèvres, just outside of Paris and was a member of the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, the best years of Fauvism.  Fauvism ended in 1908 when Henri Matisse published Notes of a Painter, in which he indicated that he was changing his mind about the direction of his art.  Indeed that very year, Matisse began teaching students who were, to his dismay, both imitating and misunderstanding Fauvism.  He made the youngsters start over—-from classicism.

   But Kandinsky was very impacted by Fauvism and his visits to the Stein collection where he saw additional works by Matisse, and the suggestion that line and color could have separate and independent existences, unfettered from the task of describing.  Formal elements, far from being inert until activated by the artist, were expressive in their own right.  Full of new ideas, he returned to Germany where Kandinsky and his associates founded the “New Artists Association,” (Neue Kunstlervereinigung), Jan 22, 1909 but the group disbanded, destroyed by quarrels over art.  The Blaue Reiter group was held together by two things, the leadership of Kandinsky and their interest in color and alternative art forms.  Otherwise, the actual work of the group is highly diverse: Franz Marc frequently focused on animals which were, he was convinced, capable of spiritual feeling,  Gabriel Münter was interested in Bavarian folk painting on glass, while Kandinsky’s paintings were moving towards abstraction.

    The group was renamed when Kandinsky and Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter in December 1911.  Der Blaue Reiter was also an “almanac,” an illustrated yearbook of the current art scene, published by the artists in 1912, 1913 and 1914 editions.  Der Blaue Reiter was also an exhibition of avant-garde art, which traveled about Europe, to Cologne, Berlin, the Hague, Frankfurt, etc.  There were also two exhibitions in Munich, at the Galerie Thannhauser at the beginning of 1912 and at the gallery of the dealer Glotz in March 1912. In 1912, Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which fused Theosophy and the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and Madame Helena Blavatsky on the universality of all elements.  Like many of the art colonies in Germany, their intense interest in all things spiritual was paradoxical.  The Blue Rider came to an end by the Great War when it broke out in August, 1914 and scattered the artists.  Leaving Gabriel Münter behind in Switzerland, Kandinsky returned to Russia where he married his second wife.  Tragically, Franz Marc was killed in action.  Kandinsky and Klee were reunited after the War at the Bauhaus, where the now-mature artists were installed as master teachers.