Der Blaue Reiter: Kandinsky, Macke, Klee, and Marc

another, acting as mere commodities, as in the prostitutes at the forefront of Kirchner's composition. (Elger, 2004)

Unlike the pastoral scenes of Impressionism and the academic drawings of Neoclassicism, Die Brücke artists used distorted forms and jarring, unnatural pigments to elicit the viewer's emotional response. The group was similarly united by a reductive and primitive aesthetic, a revival of older media and medieval German art, in which they used graphic techniques such as woodblock printing to create crude, jagged forms. (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc, 2019)

The group published a woodcut broadsheet in 1906, called Programme, to accompany their first exhibition. It summarized their break with prevailing academic traditions calling for a freer, youthoriented aesthetic. Although mostly written by Kirchner, this poster served as a manifesto stating the ideals of Die Brücke. The members of Die Brücke drew largely from the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in terms of both their artistic project and their philosophical grounding. Their name came from a quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) that states, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end." The group exhibited and collaborated through 1913, when Kirchner penned Chronik der Brücke (Brücke Chronicle) and the collective effectively dissolved. (Selz, 1974)

The artists of Der Blaue Reiter group shared an inclination towards abstraction, symbolic content, and spiritual allusion. They sought to express the emotional aspects of being through highly symbolic and brightly colored renderings (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc, 2019). Their name emerged from the symbol of the horse and rider, derived from one of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings; for Kandinsky, the rider symbolized the transition from the tangible world into the spiritual realm and thus acted as a metaphor for artistic practice. For other members such as Franz Marc, Paul, Klee, and Auguste Macke, this notion became a central principle for transcending realistic depiction and delving into abstraction.

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