Study for the Cover of Der Blaue Reiter Almanach

In 1911, in Munich, Kandinsky and the painter Franz Marc were assembling an almanac, a book that would set Bavarian glass paintings, children's drawings and carvings from Africa and the South Seas beside the newest European art, on the argument that all of it sprang from the same inner need. The book needed a cover, and this watercolor is one of about 11 that Kandinsky tried for it. The figure crossing the sheet is a rider, a horseman he traced back to Saint George and old medieval fable, and that blue horseman ended up giving the whole circle its name. Here the rider is still a man you can read on a horse, laid down in loose washes of watercolor, gouache and ink rather than the near-shapeless colour he was drifting toward in these same years. The finished Almanac of the Blue Rider came out in the middle of May 1912, with a rider on its cover close to this one.