Blaue Vier, Die
Die Blaue Vier, (
German: “The Blue Four”) successor group of Der Blaue
Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14), formed in 1924 in
Germany by the Russian artists Alexey von Jawlensky and
Wassily Kandinsky, the Swiss artist Paul Klee, and the
American-born artist Lyonel Feininger. At the time of
the group’s formation, Kandinsky, Klee, and Feininger
were teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus.
Members of the group
were united by a desire to exhibit together rather than
by similarity of style. Between 1925 and 1934
exhibitions of their work were mounted in the United
States, Mexico, and Germany.
Blue Four
[Blauen Vier].
Name applied to a
group of German painters, founded at the Bauhaus in
Weimar, Germany, on 31 March 1924. The group consisted
of Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alexei Jawlensky and
Lyonel Feininger, who were formerly associated with the
BLAUE REITER group. The idea for founding the Blue Four
came from Galka Scheyer, a former pupil of Jawlensky,
who sought to make the work and ideas of these artists
better known in the USA through exhibitions, lectures
and sales. While the Blue Four was not an official
association, its name was chosen to give American
audiences an idea about the type of artists involved and
also to allude to the artists’ previous association with
the Blaue Reiter group. In May 1924 Scheyer travelled to
New York, where the first Blue Four exhibition took
place at the Charles Daniel Gallery (Feb–March 1925).
Scheyer then moved to California, where the first of
many Blue Four exhibitions in the San Francisco and Los
Angeles areas took place at the Oakland Museum in autumn
1925. Further exhibitions, often with lectures by
Scheyer, were held in Portland, OR (1927), Seattle, WA
(1926, 1936), Spokane, WA (1927), Mexico City (1931) and
in Chicago, IL (1932), as well as at the Ferdinand
Möller Gallery in Berlin (1929)
Alexei von Jawlensky.
Love.
1925
