The blue horse galloping toward the invisible

They are called Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, August Macke. Together, they founded Der Blaue Reiter—the Blue Rider. A name that evokes medieval chivalry, lost childhood, and that mysterious color, blue, which for them is not a hue but a door opening onto the invisible. Their crime? Daring to believe that art could be something other than a copy of reality. That it could, instead, reveal what our eyes cannot see: pure emotions, the vibrations of the spirit, the secret correspondences between sounds, colors, and forms. On the eve of the First World War, as Europe prepares to plunge into chaos, they choose to gallop in the opposite direction—toward light, toward abstraction, toward what Kandinsky will call "the spiritual in art."

But how could a movement born in the bustle of Munich cafés change our way of seeing forever? And why, more than a century later, do these canvases still haunt us like messages from another time?

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01When color becomes a prayer

Picture Franz Marc in his studio in Sindelsdorf, surrounded by his animals. A tame deer grazes in one corner, a fox sleeps near the stove, birds sing in cages hung from the beams. Marc, his hands covered in paint, stares at a blank canvas. He hesitates. Then, with a decisive gesture, he dips his brush into a pot of pure ultramarine and traces the outline of a horse. Not just any horse: a blue horse. "Why blue?" he will be asked later. "Because blue is the color of the spirit," he will reply. "Yellow is the color of earthly joy. Red is violence. But blue... blue is what elevates us."

Marc did not invent this theory of colors alone. It came from Kandinsky, who in turn drew it from theosophical treatises—esoteric texts claiming to reveal the secret laws of the universe. For them, each shade is a vibration, a note in the great symphony of the cosmos. Deep blue? The sound of a cello, the melancholy of the infinite. Bright yellow? A blaring trumpet, a joy almost unbearable. Red? The dull rumble of drums, resisting matter. In painting, they do not seek to represent the world but to capture its invisible essence. Their canvases become scores, where each brushstroke is a note, each form a chord.

Take The Blue Horse I (1911), a work that encapsulates the spirit of the movement. The horse, arched like a bow, seems to float in a landscape of green and red hills. Its contours are outlined in thick black, like a medieval illumination or a stained-glass window. The color obeys no natural logic: the horse is blue, but also violet in places, as if light were passing through it. The background is a patchwork of geometric planes, where green, red, and yellow clash without blending. "I do not paint what I see, but what I feel," Marc writes to a friend. And what he feels is a nature in the process of spiritualizing itself, freeing itself from earthly weight. His animals are not beasts but symbols—messengers between heaven and earth.

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02The studio where spirits were spoken to

If Der Blaue Reiter made art history, it was also because it was much more than a pictorial movement. It was a community, a laboratory of ideas, a place where they experimented as much with brushes as with concepts. And no place embodies this spirit better than Gabriele Münter’s house in Murnau, a Bavarian village lost between mountains and lakes.

Picture the scene: a white-walled house with wide-open windows overlooking the Alps. Inside, hand-painted furniture, objects brought back from trips to Tunisia or Russia, Orthodox icons hung on the walls. Kandinsky, his hair disheveled, argues with Marc, who gestures as he talks about his horses. Münter, seated in a corner, listens while painting a still life. Sometimes Alexej von Jawlensky joins them, with his piercing eyes and Cossack mustache. They talk about everything: Wagner’s music, which for Kandinsky "sounds like yellow," Rudolf Steiner’s theories, the anthroposophist guru who claims man can communicate with spirits, the need to free art from its academic chains.

This is where, in this bohemian and mystical atmosphere, some of the movement’s most important works are born. Kandinsky paints his first Improvisations, canvases where forms seem to dance like notes on a score. Münter creates her landscapes in pure colors, where trees become green flames and houses red cubes. And it is here, too, that the group decides, in 1911, to break with the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM), the artists’ association that had just rejected one of Kandinsky’s paintings as "incomprehensible." "If we cannot exhibit here, we will create our own space," Marc declares. A few weeks later, the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter opens at the Thannhauser Gallery.

But Münter’s studio is also the stage for more intimate dramas. Münter, Kandinsky’s companion since 1902, increasingly resents his infidelities. "He has betrayed me in every possible way," she writes in her journal. Yet she continues to paint, to create, to preserve the group’s works like a treasure. During the First World War, when Kandinsky is expelled from Germany as an "enemy national," she hides their canvases in her cellar to protect them from bombs. And decades later, she will donate this collection to the Lenbachhaus in Munich, saving Der Blaue Reiter from oblivion.

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03The horse that vanishes in the storm

There is one painting by Franz Marc that encapsulates the tragic fate of the movement: The Fate of the Animals (1913). At first glance, it is an apocalyptic scene. Deer, boars, horses writhe in poses of suffering, as if struck by an invisible force. The sky is blood-red, the earth cracks, the trees seem to break under pressure. Marc painted this work two years before the First World War. "It is as if nature itself sensed the coming catastrophe," he writes to a friend.

And indeed, the catastrophe arrives. In 1914, war breaks out. Marc, a lifelong pacifist, nevertheless enlists as a volunteer. "I cannot stand aside while my country needs me," he explains. He will die two years later, cut down by shrapnel near Verdun. Macke, too, will be killed at the front. Kandinsky, expelled from Germany, returns to Russia. Jawlensky, ill, goes into exile in Switzerland. The group scatters, swept away by the storm they had foreseen.

Yet their legacy endures. In the 1920s, Kandinsky will teach at the Bauhaus, where he will pass on his theories of color and form to a new generation of artists. Marc will become an icon in Germany, his blue horses reproduced on stamps, posters, art books. And their ideas will continue to circulate, like seeds carried by the wind, influencing abstract expressionism, surrealism, and even contemporary art.

But perhaps Der Blaue Reiter’s greatest legacy lies elsewhere. It is in the idea that art need not imitate reality but reveal its soul. That color can be a prayer, form a meditation, the canvas a mirror held up to the invisible. And that sometimes, when you see a blue horse galloping in an unreal landscape, you glimpse something beyond painting—a deeper, more mysterious truth that words cannot express.

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04The mystery of the lost horse

There is a painting by Franz Marc that has disappeared. A mythical work, known today only through descriptions and a few black-and-white photographs. It is called The Tower of Blue Horses (1913), and it depicts four horses stacked one on top of the other, like a living column. Their bodies are a deep, almost black blue, and their eyes seem to fix the viewer with hypnotic intensity.

This work was exhibited only once, in 1913, at the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. Then it vanished. Some say it was destroyed during the Second World War. Others claim it was stolen by the Nazis, who considered Der Blaue Reiter "degenerate art." Still others believe it hides somewhere, in a private collection, waiting to be rediscovered.

In 2017, the magazine Der Spiegel conducted an investigation to try to find the painting. Journalists followed leads in Switzerland, Russia, and the United States. They interviewed experts, collectors, heirs of former Nazi officers. But the trail of the blue horse went cold, as if it had chosen to remain invisible.

And perhaps that is for the best. Perhaps some works are not meant to be seen but to be dreamed. Perhaps The Tower of Blue Horses is like the Grail of modern art—an object of quest, an enigma reminding us that art, sometimes, is stronger than history.

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05When abstraction becomes a religion

Wassily Kandinsky never hid his ambition: to make painting a new form of spirituality. "Art must be like a church," he writes in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), "a place where man can reflect, purify himself, connect with the infinite." For him, color is a divine vibration, form a silent prayer. And abstraction? A way to free oneself from the chains of reality to access a higher truth.

His first abstract works, like Composition VII (1913), are true explosions of color and form. Red whirlwinds, blue splotches, black lines that seem to dance on the canvas like liberated spirits. "It is as if a window had been opened onto another world," writes a critic of the time. And indeed, that is exactly what Kandinsky seeks to do: open a window onto the invisible.

But how to paint the invisible? How to give form to what has none? Kandinsky finds the answer in music. For him, a canvas must function like a symphony: each color is a note, each form a chord, each composition a melody. "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings," he writes. And the painter? A composer improvising, guided by intuition and emotion.

This idea that art can be a spiritual experience will deeply influence the 20th century. Artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman will take up this quest for the sublime, this desire to create works that represent nothing yet are something—modern icons, doors opening onto the infinite.

And even today, when you stand before a Kandinsky canvas, you feel that strange sensation: of facing something that surpasses you, that speaks to you in a language you do not fully understand but that touches you to your core.

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06The blue horse still gallops

More than a century after its creation, Der Blaue Reiter continues to fascinate. Its canvases hang in the world’s greatest museums, its ideas still inspire artists, its colors blaze on gallery walls. But why does this movement, born in the bustle of Munich cafés, still speak to us?

Perhaps because it captured something essential: the idea that art is not just a matter of technique or beauty but also of quest, doubt, spirituality. That painting is also searching, losing oneself, finding oneself again. That color can be a prayer, form a meditation, the canvas a mirror held up to the invisible.

And perhaps, too, because in a world increasingly dominated by the virtual, by screens, by the instantaneous, Der Blaue Reiter reminds us that art can be something other than entertainment. That it can be an experience, a revelation, a way to touch the soul.

So the next time you see a blue horse galloping in an unreal landscape, do not ask what it represents. Ask instead what it makes you feel. And perhaps, like Kandinsky, like Marc, like all those who believed in the power of art, you will hear, in the silence of the canvas, the whisper of something that surpasses you.

Something invisible. But very real.