The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) art movement was founded in 1911, by the young painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and remained active in Europe until 1914. Originally published in Munich, in 1912, and edited by Kandinsky and Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac presented the movement's synthesis of international culture to the European avant-garde at large. In both the selection of the essays and its innovative interplay of word and image, the Almanac remains one of the most critically important works on artistic theory and culture of the twentieth century. This edition, long unavailable in English and indispensable to any student of modernism, includes the original documents and musical notations, as well as essays by Kandinsky, Schonberg, Marc, and others, and an extensive critical introduction, placing the Blaue Reiter in context for contemporary readers.

For just a few years at the beginning of the twentieth century, Munich was the ?hot spot? of Germany?s artistic avant-garde. Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc?s initiative as founding editors of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a stroke of luck for the arts. The journal and exhibition of the same name made international waves when they heralded the start of the modern era in Germany before the First World War. Since then, the names of the movement?s key players Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, August Macke et al., signal an essential chapter in the international history of art marked by the transition of painting into a vibrant, colorful and transcendental form of abstraction. This beautiful publication that dedicates itself to this topic will show a revolutionary re-valuation of the arts in an open Europe.00Exhibition: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (4.9.2016-22.1.2017).

Study of the Russian painter and 'inventor' of Abstract Art, Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and the European artists who formed the 'Blaue Reiter' group from 1911 onwards

Join the heady ride of Der Blaue Reiter, the group of artists who galloped just three years of the early 20th century together, but in their rejection of establishment standards and charge into a new artistic realm marked a major step in the evolution of European Expressionist and abstract art.

Now in an updated English edition with full color illustrations, Kandinsky's fascinating and witty artist's book represents a crucial moment in the painter's move toward abstraction.

The founder of abstract art The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of twentieth-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting. Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the "Blauer Reiter" in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the "First Abstract Watercolour" of 1910. In his theoretical writings Kandinsky repeatedly sought the proximity of music; and just as in music, where the individual notes constitute the medium whose effect stems from harmony and euphony, Kandinsky was aiming for a pure concord of colour through the interplay of various shades. Gauguin had demanded that everything "must be sacrificed to pure colours". Kandinsky was the first to realise this and thus to influence a whole range of artists. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions