{"id":1913,"date":"2026-08-25T16:13:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/?p=1913"},"modified":"2026-08-25T16:22:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:22:20","slug":"beyond-the-world-kandinsky-improvisation-and-the-making-of-abstraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/?p=1913","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the World: Kandinsky, Improvisation and the Making of Abstraction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Beyond the world<\/span><\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Kandinsky, Improvisation and the Making of Abstraction<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the World. The Blue Rider<\/em>\u00a0at Munich\u2019s Lenbachhaus brings together more than 240 works by artists including Kandinsky, M\u00fcnter, Marc, Jawlensky and Werefkin, focusing on the years around the\u00a0Blaue Reiter<\/em>\u00a0exhibitions of 1911\u201312. Curated by Melanie Vietmeier and Matthias M\u00fchling, the show presents the group as an international network rather than a single stylistic movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 01. Kandinsky, W. (1911)\u00a0Romantische Landschaft<\/em>. St\u00e4dtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau M\u00fcnchen. Photograph by author, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lenbachhaus gives an almost overwhelming first impression\u2014a structure poised somewhere between stately grandeur and, once one enters the courtyard garden, complete romanticism. The mood is already set, yet it offers little preparation for what follows. Entering the first exhibition room devoted to Kandinsky feels like a sudden plunge into abstraction at its most vivid. Colour seems to move across the canvases; shapes collide, dissolve and re-form; compositions pulse with an almost physical energy. It is difficult to reconcile these works with the fact that they were made at the beginning of the twentieth century, during years in which Europe was moving steadily towards the First World War. Yet here the visible world seems to loosen its grip. Landscape, object and figure begin to dissolve into colour, rhythm and sensation. For a moment, one enters a kind of bubble of vivid life, summer and joy\u2014luminous, restless and strangely detached from the historical weight gathering outside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 2. Kandinsky, W. (1910)\u00a0Murnau mit Kirche I<\/em>. St\u00e4dtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau M\u00fcnchen. Photograph by author, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kandinsky & The Lenbach Haus<\/span><\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Lenbachhaus began as the home and studio of the celebrated nineteenth-century portrait painter Franz von Lenbach, who built the Tuscan-style villa between 1887 and 1890. Acquired by the City of Munich, it opened as a municipal gallery in 1929. Its transformation into one of the most important museums of early modernism, however, came several decades later through Gabriele M\u00fcnter. (Lenbachhaus<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kandinsky, born in Moscow in 1866, originally studied law and economics before abandoning an academic career and moving to Munich in 1896, aged thirty, to study painting. M\u00fcnter entered his class at the Phalanx art school in 1902 and the two became a couple the following year. They travelled extensively before returning to Bavaria in 1908, where, together with Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, they spent an intensely productive summer painting in Murnau. The Lenbachhaus identifies this period\u2014with its increasingly simplified forms, flattened space and liberated colour\u2014as a crucial beginning of what would become Der Blaue Reiter<\/em>. (Lenbachhaus<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M\u00fcnter was not simply Kandinsky\u2019s companion but an important painter and participant in the Blue Rider herself. In 1911 she left the Neue K\u00fcnstlervereinigung M\u00fcnchen together with Kandinsky and Franz Marc and took part in the first Blaue Reiter<\/em> exhibition. (Lenbachhaus<\/a>) Decades later, in 1957, she gave the Lenbachhaus more than one thousand works connected with the group, including ninety oil paintings and around 330 watercolours and drawings by Kandinsky, alongside her own work and that of Marc, Macke, Klee, Jawlensky and Werefkin. The donation established the Lenbachhaus as the world\u2019s largest collection of Der Blaue Reiter<\/em>. (Lenbachhaus<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is because of this extraordinary intersection of artistic partnership, preservation and generosity that Kandinsky\u2019s development can be followed here with such clarity\u2014from the still recognisable landscapes of Murnau towards the increasingly liberated world of the Impressions<\/em> and Improvisations<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 3-5. Kandinsky, W. (1911)\u00a0Impression III (Konzert)<\/em>. St\u00e4dtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau M\u00fcnchen. Photograph by author, 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would keep the wonder and the slightly lyrical movement, but make the Frankenthaler\/Mitchell reference explicitly retrospective:
Standing before\u00a0Impression III (Konzert)<\/em>, I wondered at how completely Kandinsky had begun to set painting free. Shapes still hover at the edge of recognition, fragments that might once have belonged to figures, architecture or landscape, but they are already dissolving into colour and rhythm. Kandinsky seems to have spread his wings and flown far beyond conventional landscape painting. Looking from the present, faint echoes of Helen Frankenthaler\u2019s colour fields and Joan Mitchell\u2019s expansive abstraction inevitably cross my mind\u2014not as influences, of course, but as later resonances. Then I return to Kandinsky, listen again to the music of the painting, and allow myself to get lost in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 6. Kandinsky, W. (1911)\u00a0Improvisation 19<\/em>. St\u00e4dtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau M\u00fcnchen. Photograph by author, 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Blue Rider: A New Visual Language<\/span><\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Blue Rider: A New Visual Language<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Der Blaue Reiter<\/em> grew out of an intense exchange between artists rather than a fixed movement with one style. Kandinsky, Gabriele M\u00fcnter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin had already spent the summer of 1908 painting together in Murnau, experimenting with stronger colour, simplified forms and an increasing freedom from conventional representation. By 1911 Kandinsky and Franz Marc were developing the Blaue Reiter<\/em> almanac, while Kandinsky, Marc and M\u00fcnter broke away from the Neue K\u00fcnstlervereinigung M\u00fcnchen after one of Kandinsky\u2019s increasingly abstract works was rejected from an exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What seems most exciting about the Blue Rider today is precisely this sense of openness. There was no single visual language to follow. M\u00fcnter remained closely connected to landscape and everyday life, Marc transformed animals through symbolic colour, while Kandinsky pushed further towards abstraction. What united them was perhaps less a style than a desire to move beyond what could simply be seen\u2014to find ways of expressing inner experience, emotion and something spiritual through colour, rhythm and form. Music, folk art, children\u2019s drawings and non-European traditions all entered this expanded field of possibility. The first Blaue Reiter<\/em> exhibition opened in Munich in December 1911, followed by a second in 1912, bringing together very different artists around this shared sense that painting could become something more than representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A truly ambitious and deeply impressive exhibition, spanning the different artists and approaches of Der Blaue Reiter<\/em>. Yet my attention remained with Kandinsky. I found myself returning to his paintings again and again, unable to let go of their exuberance, their colour and movement\u2014as if trying to capture something of the unmistakable joy Kandinsky himself must have experienced as painting opened up before him and he discovered a new artistic freedom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kandinsky, Improvisation and the Making of Abstraction Beyond the World. The Blue Rider\u00a0at Munich\u2019s Lenbachhaus brings together more than 240 works by artists including Kandinsky, M\u00fcnter, Marc, Jawlensky and Werefkin, focusing on the years around the\u00a0Blaue Reiter\u00a0exhibitions of 1911\u201312. Curated by Melanie Vietmeier and Matthias M\u00fchling, the show presents the group as an international network […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1942,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1913"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1941,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913\/revisions\/1941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellipsis.pink\/phl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}