Else Lasker-Schüler to Marianne von Werefkin 1913

„Der Blaue Reiter“ (The Blue Rider) was a collective of artists who made transformative contributions to painting, graphic art, literature, and music. With its two exhibitions organized in 1911 and 1912 and the almanac published in 1912, it stands for subjectivity in art, the liberation of color from the object, and the idea of equality between artistic forms of expression from different eras, genres, and regions. It is thus part of the international avant-garde movements before the First World War.

To this day, it remains almost completely unexplored what a significant role the individual female artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter played in the development of modernism, what strategies and networks they devised in order to lead a life as independent artists despite the prevailing social norms of the time, which were completely hostile to them, And who were all these artists, some of whom have been completely forgotten and whose lives can hardly be reconstructed? These are the themes of the exhibition Die Blauen Reiterinnen (The Blue Rider Women).
And here they are:

An exhibition in cooperation with the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen and the Städtischen Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich and the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin in Ascona, Switzerland.

1 Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table, 1912, Municipal Gallery in the Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich, Gabriele Münter Foundation 1957 © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2026
2 Maria Franck-Marc, Peonies, 1909. Museum Wiesbaden. Photo: Museum Wiesbaden / Bernd Fickert
3 Natalia Gontscharowa, The Bathers, circa 1910, Museum Wiesbaden, acquired with the support of the Hessian Cultural Foundation, Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts in Wiesbaden, and the state capital of Wiesbaden.