Kandinsky is the star of Tate’s expressionist show

‘We invented the name Blaue Reiter whilst sitting around a coffee table in Marc’s garden at Sindelsdorf… we both loved blue, Marc liked horses and I liked riders, so the name came of its own accord.’ Christened so casually by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911, the Blue Rider was always more of an idea than an art society, but the Tate Modern’s new exhibition – the first in the UK since 1960 – makes it sound more contemporary by describing it as a transnational collective. In practice, as Kandinsky’s partner Gabriele Münter remembered, it was ‘only a group of friends who shared a common passion for painting as a form of self-expression’ – a loose affiliation centred on two figures: Kandinsky, who formulated its philosophy, and Marianne von Werefkin, whose ferocious networking skills got the show on the road.

Both had arrived in Munich from Russia in 1896 as mature students to study at Anton Azbe’s progressive art school, Werefkin with her protégé Alexej von Jawlensky in tow. Within a year, this polyglot Russian aristocrat had founded a weekly salon for international artists, writers and musicians; dubbed ‘the Baroness’ (and, less flatteringly, ‘manwoman’), she struck Marc on first acquaintance in 1910 as ‘the soul of the whole operation’.

The soul of the operation, in other words, was Russian. Don’t be misled into thinking this is a German expressionist show: Marc and his partner Maria Franck, August Macke and his wife Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke were German, as was Münter, but the Dresden lot of expressionists, Die Brücke, are absent. Given that Kandinsky gets stick in the catalogue for describing a canvas as being colonised ‘by the imperious brush’, Die Brücke’s brand of appropriated ‘primitivism’ might have been a bridge too far. Still, their inclusion would have added structure to a rather amorphous collection of work.