Blaue Reiter, Der

Blaue Reiter, Der (German, “The Blue Rider”), informal association of Expressionist artists formed in Munich, Germany, in 1911. The leading members were the Russians Wassily Kandinsky and Alexey von Jawlensky, the Germans Franz Marc and August Macke, and the Swiss Paul Klee. Other Russians, as well as Cubist and Fauve artists from Paris, were invited to exhibit with them.

The group took its name from Marc's paintings of blue horses and Kandinsky's of riders dressed in blue. Like the contemporary Expressionist group Die Brücke in Berlin, who also exhibited with them, Der Blaue Reiter rejected convention and sought self-expression, but they were international in scope and had no homogeneous style. Their common bond was a desire to express what their exhibition catalogue described as their “inner impulses”.

The group dissolved at the outbreak of World War I, but its influence continued through the Bauhaus school, where both Kandinsky and Klee later taught.