Expressionists review: a ‘rousing’ exhibition at the Tate Modern

Between 1911 and 1914, an international collective of painters calling themselves Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) instigated “a revolution in modern art”, said Daria Hufnagel in The Independent.

Although based in Munich, the movement’s leading lights hailed from all around Europe and shared a belief that art could be used to express “personal experiences and spiritual ideas”: they used colour and compositional structure not to record objective reality, but to evoke mood and feeling. The group numbered several artists – including the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the German Franz Marc and the Swiss Paul Klee – who would be remembered as icons of modernism, plus many others who have since been “overlooked”.