There was a sense that anything could happen in turn-of-the-century Germany: a fizzing, crackling energy of potential. When it did finally burst into life, it was in the form of brutal, global warfare. But on the walls of Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is another kind of potential: radical, beautiful artistic expression.
The Blue Rider was a Munich-based art collective revolving around Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, the original modern art power couple. Artists from countless backgrounds and disciplines congregated around them from all over Europe, drawn to their borderlessness, openness, genderlessness. The Blue Rider embraced everything new. As a result, there’s not a whole lot of aesthetic cohesion going on here. The opening rooms feature blocky semi-abstraction by Robert Delaunay, shimmering hot pink interiors by Kandinsky, stark architectural geometricism by Lyonel Feininger, beautiful vulnerable portraiture by Elisabeth Epstein, neatly composed street photography by Münter and everything in between. Portraits play on ideas of gender, interiors are intimate and private, street scenes show the encroaching tide of modernity; some artists strive for emotion and movement, others for pushing the form of painting as far as humanly possible. The Blue Rider was a mishmash, a hodgepodge, and sure, a bit of a mess.
And that was by design. Because what was happening in 1911 Munich was the forging of new possible paths towards the future. They were figuring things out.
These are the paths of modernity that would become most well-trodden
The rest of the show is grouped thematically according to the obsessions of the group. There’s spirituality, colour, sound, theatre, dance: everything was possible. Including the possibility of not being very good. I’d like to never see another ugly, schlocky, dark, poorly composed Marianne Werefkin ever again, Franz Marc’s emo-spiritualism feels like futurism robbed of its power, Alexey Jawlensky’s work is pretty heinous, Münter’s own photography isn’t half as interesting as they tell you it is and they’ve managed to pick some of the ugliest Paul Klee paintings he ever did. None of which is helped by the exhibition having so many half-arsed areas of focus. Again, a bit of a mess.
But Kandinsky and Münter come out of this really well. Him, hell bent on exploding painting into a million incredible interwoven strands of representation. Her, hell bent on simplifying it, reducing it down to its simplest, barest elements. Münter’s flat planes of minimal simplicity and Kandinsky’s hectic, chaotic complexity: these are the paths of modernity that would become most well-trodden, this is the radical potential of new art slowly starting to be realised.