Le Cavalier bleu

Kandinsky painted this small canvas in Bavaria in 1903, years before he became known for pure abstraction. A rider in a blue cloak crosses a bright meadow on a white horse, a wood behind him, and already the colour is doing more work than the story. The blue cloak, the white horse, the flick of red at the bridle, the dappled green ground, all of it is laid down in loose patches that start to come loose from the thing they describe. Blue, for Kandinsky, was the colour that pulled a person toward the infinite. Eight years later, in 1911, he and Franz Marc took the words Blue Rider as the name for the group of artists they founded in Munich, and the phrase now belongs more to that movement than to this early painting where it started.