A hilariously abrupt portrait by Gabriele Münter, at Tate Modern, shows a pink-faced man at a dinner table, eyebrows raised with candid amazement. His eyes are two startled blue dots. He is the Russian painter Alexej Jawlensky, and Münter’s firm black outlines curve affectionately round her friend’s balding head, down his tweed jacket and into the small theatre of objects on the table, culminating in a neglected sandwich.
Listening (Portrait of Jawlensky) is the title of this 1909 painting, but Jawlensky is not absorbing music. According to Münter, he is actually listening to her lover Wassily Kandinsky rabbiting on about his spiritual theories of art (inspired by theosophy, to which he had a lifelong attachment). Indeed, Kandinsky is still holding forth, this time visible and centre stage, in Münter’s double portrait of 1912 with the painter Erma Bossi.
Kandinsky is wearing shorts, sandals and something like leg-warmers as he gesticulates over the tea table to the attentive Bossi. They are in Münter’s house in Murnau, on the edge of the Bavarian Alps; though not for much longer. Soon the first world war will break out and all Russian “enemies” of the German state will be forced to flee. Kandinsky departs for Switzerland, along with Jawlensky, and by 1916 the relationship with Münter is over.
All of these artists and more, generally concentrated around Munich or Murnau, are members of the celebrated Blaue Reiter – Blue Rider – group, subject of this rousing exhibition. What a force their screaming blue expressionism must have had, driving hard at the prewar German bourgeoisie.
Kandinsky tears rainbows into candyfloss clouds in the skies above Murnau. Bossi paints mauve acrobats racing horseback around multicoloured circuses. Franz Marc’s cows leap in joyous ochre and umber against arsenical green skies. Elisabeth Epstein paints herself as a yellow woman, half-clad in a white chemise, circa 1911. But her fellow Russian, Marianne Werefkin, is the wildest self-portraitist of them all – turning fiercely at the viewer from beneath an outsize hat, yellow light flaring down one side of her face, eyes the lurid scarlet of some sci-fi monster.
Like Münter, Werefkin was also a spirited writer. With this painting, she declared, the artist had caught “the male gazes that call for a slap”. This is far more expressive, so to speak, than the wall text’s prissy assertion that Werefkin is “confronting gender stereotypes”.
Anyone hoping to visit for a torrent of staggeringly expressive art should be warned that the show does not start out this way. A notice at the entrance tries to temper our expectations with pious references to imperial ideologies, social inequalities and even environmental issues. And if you think colour was an immediate and potent means of dissent, the exhibition actually begins in black and white.
Münter, who spoke several languages and travelled three continents, was an eager photographer. In 1899, she passed through America with a Kodak No 2 Bulls-Eye camera. Her photographs of three stylish black Texans on a boardwalk, an African-American sheriff smiling for her lens, and various prairies open the show. These painstaking prints were only recently made; it is hard to believe that they really mattered as much to Münter as to the present curators.
And there is more. Photographs of a trip she took to Tunisia with Kandinsky in 1904 pad out another gallery, along with souvenirs. Do we really need a bleary shot of the ship on which they sailed? Much more is made of Werefkin’s “gender fluidity”, despite her many decades with Jawlensky, than her sufferings as a stateless person after the Bolshevik revolution. A whole gallery is devoted to the androgynous Ukraine-born dancer and choreographer Alexander Sackharoff, complete with biographical documents, as if he himself was more important than Jawlensky and Werefkin’s coruscating portraits of him.
This is effectively a museum within a museum: a vast tranche of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, augmented with occasional paintings from the Werefkin foundation and others. It is elegantly displayed – and carefully educational. Schoenberg plays in a gallery about music in relation to painting, specifically that of Kandinsky (whose exalted talk of the relationship never seems to amount to more than your average synaesthesia). There is a history of colour theories, including all the usual references to Goethe and Michel Chevreul. You look through mounted cameras at Marc’s Deer in the Snow to appreciate his use of the colour prism.
But still they look like cute little bambis; Marc could be kitsch. And so could Kandinsky, his Lady in Moscow all flying priests and Chagallesque peasants. Germany seems to be where everything changes. Here is Münter’s marvellous double portrait of Werefkin and Jawlensky angled on a brilliant green mountainside beneath a blazing cobalt wedge, hands and faces joyous apricot ovals. And Werefkin’s The Red Tree, a lollipop of scarlet whorls beneath an Alpine peak that seems to shiver with alien intensity.
Above all, Kandinsky’s Murnau – View with Railway and Castle gathers up the Blue Rider Group momentum. The black train darts its trail of white smoke across a landscape that is turning orange and green in weightless flying forms. The castle burns turquoise and orange on its high hill. The thrill of it all exceeds any ordinary, naturalistic description.
The famous Blue Rider Almanac, first published in 1912, with its exquisite modernist lithographs and esoteric manifestos, appears quite late in this show – a holy grail in a glass case. But it hardly matters, for you have already understood just what an explosion this was. It is there in August Macke’s beautiful portrait of his wife, Elizabeth, her face a luscious passage of old-world realism even as the apples in the dish she carries are turning into a glowing Cézanne.
It is there in Werefkin’s mordant portraits, with their burning lips and acid eyes, a high-chrome presentiment of the Weimar spirit to come. It is there in the stream of paintings by Kandinsky, running all the way from ecstatic cows and golden horses to the eschatological visions of saints and heavens that precede his pure and dynamic abstraction.
And it is there in the art of Münter, who is at long last beginning to receive her due in this country, first at the Royal Academy two years ago and now here. From all of these other people – these more famous painters – who poured through her life, and her house at Murnau, she made the most mirthfully original portraits.
