The Archer

Description

In 1911, inspired by the Munich New Artists’ Association rejection of his boldly abstract painting Composition 5, Kandinsky and fellow artists Gabriele Münter, Alfred Kubin, and Franz Marc founded the association Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky articulated the group’s view of art as a spiritual activity in their most important theoretical text, The Almanac of the Blue Rider (1912): “The art of today . . . does not only reflect the spiritual achievements already acquired, but also enshrines, as a materializing force, the spirituality that is ripe to the point of revelation.”
In their simple form and bright palette, Kandinsky’s works from this period evoke the Russian folk paintings of his childhood, as well as the glass paintings he admired from the Bavarian countryside in which he lived with Münter. In Rider Kandinsky has created an abstracted landscape in which his signature motif of a horse and rider boldly leap across the composition. The work is characteristic of how Kandinsky used color to great effect in his compositions. It was his theory of the profound psychological effects of form and color upon the viewer and the spiritual power of making art itself that he detailed in his seminal work of twentieth-century art theory, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst) published in 1912.
Text written by Katharine A. Weiss, Exhibitions Assistant, on the occasion of the UMMA exhibition Graphic Visions: German Expressionist Prints and Drawings, January 25–April 6, 2003, West Gallery