by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2023
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Blue Mountain by Wassily Kandinsky: Introduction
Three riders move below a broad blue mountain. A yellow-orange tree fills the left side of the picture; a deep red and violet tree presses in from the right. Between them, a pale opening rises above the blue. The subject of Wassily Kandinsky's Blue Mountain can still be named, yet little in its colour behaves like an ordinary view of the countryside. Painted in 1908–09, the canvas shows Kandinsky making a landscape depend on the pressure and rhythm of its painted forms. It belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. [1]; [2].
Watch: Wassily Kandinsky
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Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle
Curator Megan Fontanella introduces Kandinsky and the Guggenheim collection.
Watch on YouTubeAt a Glance
- Artist:Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944).
- Title:Blue Mountain (Der blaue Berg).
- Date:1908–09.
- Medium and size:oil on canvas, 106 × 96.6 cm.
- Collection:Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Founding Collection, by gift, 41.505.
- Visible subject:three riders before a blue mountain framed by two large trees.
Where this work sits in Kandinsky’s career
The Blue Rider
1903Composition VII
1913Composition VIII
1923Several Circles
1926Sky Blue
1940Contents
- First look: a mountain between two trees
- Where are the riders?
- Colour that does more than describe
- How does the picture guide a viewer's eye?
- How specific is the place?
- Painting on a different scale
- Before and after Blue Mountain
- Munich, Murnau and the Blue Rider name
- A different painting called Mountain
- Is this already abstract art?
- Why Blue Mountain matters
- Frequently asked questions
- References
First look: a mountain between two trees
The blue mountain is not a distant triangular backdrop. It occupies much of the centre and lower part of the painting, rising behind the riders and pushing forward into their space. Its contour climbs from the left, reaches a high point near the middle, then falls towards the right. Dark flecks break up the surface. Because the mountain is such an intense blue, it can feel both like a solid mass and like an active colour area. We can identify it as a mountain without needing to imagine natural daylight producing that hue.
On the left, the yellow-orange tree occupies nearly the entire height of the canvas. Its crown is broad and densely touched with black, red and other small marks. At the right, the other tree is darker, dominated by red, crimson, purple and near-black. The two make a frame, but not a symmetrical one. The left side glows and expands; the right side is heavier and more enclosing. A pale strip of sky or clearing between their upper edges leads the eye down towards the blue form. That opening stops the painting from becoming a closed wall of saturated colour.
The trees also provide a measure of scale. If they were merely distant ornaments, the riders would be the picture's clear centre. Instead, the huge crowns claim as much attention as the moving figures. The world around the riders feels active. Marks seem to flicker through the foliage, and there is little calm, empty space where the eye can rest. Kandinsky has made the setting into a force rather than a neutral stage.
The Guggenheim notes the rhythmic, unrealistic brushwork of the trees while observing that the riders remain legible. This pairing is a useful way into the painting. Its subject has not vanished; it is being changed by the way colour and paint are organised around it. [2].
Where are the riders?
The three mounted figures pass across the lower part of the painting, before the mountain. Their bodies and horses overlap with one another and with the strong colours around them. A light horse toward the right lifts its head; a warmer, reddish form appears toward the left; the central passages mix pale yellow, green and darker marks. Riders and mounts are not outlined with even precision. Their direction, repeated forms and bright legs are enough to make a procession visible.
Looking for them takes a moment. The blue mountain may catch the eye first, followed by the competing tree colours. Then the figures begin to resolve from the densely painted foreground. This order of seeing matters. Kandinsky could have isolated each horse against a calm background. He instead places them where the broader picture's colours and short strokes press into their forms. They remain distinct enough to carry a subject, but their edges no longer seal them off from the landscape.
The riders are small relative to the trees and mountain, yet they establish movement. Their progress across the base of the picture gives the large, comparatively fixed mountain a counterforce. The trees rise; the riders move laterally. The contours of the hill bend over them. These directions produce a scene that can be followed with the eye even without a detailed road, horizon or map of the terrain.
The Guggenheim's discussion of Kandinsky's 1908–14 transition treats the rider as an increasingly significant motif in his art. Some works of the following years draw on apocalyptic narratives. That broader setting does not prove that each of the three figures here represents a named Horseman from the Book of Revelation. Blue Mountain predates many of Kandinsky's more explicit apocalyptic images, and its three riders do not match the number in that biblical title. The safer point is visual and historical: the mounted figure was available to Kandinsky as a strong image of movement at a moment when he was testing how much a recognisable subject could be transformed. [1].
Colour that does more than describe
In a conventional landscape, colour may tell us what a place looked like under a certain light. Here the blue mountain, yellow tree and red tree are too emphatic and too differently weighted to function only as an observed scene. The title makes the blue unsurprising in one sense: it names what we see. The painting then asks what that blue does. It separates the riders from the pale sky, balances the warm trees and stretches across the composition as a powerful central shape.
Yellow and red do different work on either side. Yellow-orange opens the left edge, broken by lively specks. The red-violet tree at right closes the frame and gives the blue a deeper neighbouring colour. If we imagined the trees as equally green, much of the painting's tension would disappear. Kandinsky has used their difference to organise the whole surface. The eye travels from warm light to darker red, crosses the blue mountain and returns to the small colour events below.
The Guggenheim's essay describes this use of non-natural colour as part of Kandinsky's move towards abstraction: colour becomes expressive rather than strictly descriptive. That is an institutional interpretation, grounded in how the canvas is painted, not a dictionary in which one hue must always mean a single emotion. The painting does not supply a fixed equation for blue, yellow or red. Their effects arise here from placement, scale and contrast. [2].
Short touches of colour matter as much as the broad areas. The yellow tree is interrupted by dark spots; the blue mountain by many small flecks; the foreground by light and warm marks that help us separate the horses. The marks create a rhythm across otherwise large shapes. They keep the landscape from becoming three flat blocks of colour. The surface feels worked and active, as if the large forms are being continually stirred by smaller decisions.
How does the picture guide a viewer's eye?
The painting presents more than a set of bright areas. Its largest forms make a route for looking. The two tree crowns meet the upper edge, leaving a lighter wedge between them. That wedge points downward toward the peak. The peak's sides carry attention to the lower half, where the riders cross from one colour zone into another. The journey is not a straight line. The left tree's dappled touches repeatedly draw the eye back up; the red tree's heavier mass holds it at the opposite edge. The canvas asks us to circulate between large structure and smaller events.
The foreground complicates this route. A horse's light body may stand out for a moment, then merge with adjacent yellow and green strokes. The figures are easier to understand when we look at their collective movement than when we try to separate every limb from every patch of paint. That choice suits the composition. Kandinsky makes movement visible through repetition and contrast, not through the perfectly bounded anatomy of three horses. The riders become an activity across the bottom of the painting.
It is also worth noticing what the canvas does not offer. There is no wide horizontal horizon stretching behind the horses, no detailed track showing exactly where they have come from, and no calm patch of unbroken sky. The blue slope functions as a landscape feature, yet it is so close in colour and scale that it becomes a compositional wall. A viewer can imagine travelling through the scene while also feeling held against the surface of the painting. This is one reason the work is so effective as a bridge between a story-like subject and Kandinsky's later concern with relationships among coloured forms. The Guggenheim's account of the still-clear riders and increasingly unrealistic trees fits that experience. [2].
How specific is the place?
Kandinsky's time around Murnau gives the painting a historical setting, and mountains were part of the landscapes he and his circle encountered. Yet the museum sources cited here do not identify this canvas as a measured view from a named road or a topographical record of a particular peak. The title describes a blue mountain, not a map location. The height of the two trees, the unusual colours and the compressed space all suggest that the picture's task is broader than documenting a place. [7]; [1].
This distinction does not make the landscape meaningless. A mountain gives the riders something to pass before and makes their scale intelligible. Trees create a foreground-like frame. A pale opening suggests space beyond. These are enough cues for an imagined terrain. What Kandinsky alters is their ordinary hierarchy. The mountain is not merely far away; it is a central blue force. The trees are not background vegetation; they are nearly as commanding as the mountain. The place is therefore experienced through the pressure of colour rather than reconstructed as a location one could walk into with confidence.
That is also why a literal reading of the title can mislead. Der blaue Berg tells us which form to recognise, but it does not settle how the picture should be understood. The mountain's blue shapes the balance of the entire canvas. Its importance is both a matter of subject and a matter of painting. Recognising that double role keeps a viewer from having to choose between the identifiable scene and the larger visual experiment.
Painting on a different scale
The canvas measures 106 × 96.6 cm, close to a square and much larger than many of Kandinsky's early prints. That scale changes how its colour can meet a viewer. A broad tree crown or blue slope is large enough to occupy a substantial field of vision, while the riders still ask for a closer look. The picture operates at both distances. From across a room, the three dominant colours declare its structure. Nearer to it, strokes, overlaps and the figures' partly dissolved details become more apparent. [1].
The medium matters too. This is oil on canvas, not a woodcut or a small work on paper. Kandinsky could build dense patches, change the pressure of a brushstroke and let marks of one colour interrupt another. The marks in the trees seem laid down in many small touches rather than smoothed into a uniform surface. The mountain, while large in shape, likewise resists a single unbroken tone. Without a technical conservation report it would be unwise to prescribe the exact order of every paint layer, but the visible variety of touch is central to the way the scene works.
An archival Guggenheim lecture contrasts Blue Mountain with an earlier, smaller Kandinsky scene and notes both its larger scale and brighter, looser oil painting. The lecture suggests French painting as one influence on Kandinsky's development, while recognising the continued story-like atmosphere of his earlier work. That comparison is more useful than a claim that one influence alone caused this painting. Kandinsky had travelled and looked widely; the visible evidence here is the combination of a dramatic old motif with increasingly forceful colour and brushwork. [4].
Before and after Blue Mountain
The rider appears well before this canvas. Kandinsky's The Blue Rider of 1903 is a separate early painting, and Couple Riding of 1906–07 places mounted figures within a dark, richly patterned scene. In Blue Mountain, riders still travel through an imagined landscape, but the mountain and trees have become so strongly coloured that the setting competes with them. The comparison shows change without asking us to treat the earlier works as failed attempts at later abstraction. Each makes its own use of a moving figure. [1]; [8].
After Blue Mountain, Kandinsky continued to alter what a rider could be. In some paintings the figure remained readable; elsewhere it contracted into a sign among increasingly independent forms. The Museum of Modern Art's Kandinsky: Compositions catalogue notes that a group of three riders before a mountain could serve as a precedent for later complex canvases. This is a connection of motifs, not evidence that he planned all his later paintings in 1908–09. [5].
A later comparison with Composition VII makes the extent of change visible. The 1913 composition is much larger and more densely worked, with forms whose relation to particular figures is far less direct. Blue Mountain still offers a named hill, trees and mounted figures. The difference is not a simple line from representation to its total absence. It is a change in how openly the painting lets a viewer identify its parts, and how much of its energy is carried by relationships that cannot be reduced to depicted objects. [5]; [2].
Munich, Murnau and the Blue Rider name
The painting belongs to the years in which Kandinsky and his circle were working in and around Munich and Murnau. The Lenbachhaus dates an important shared summer of painting in Murnau to 1908. Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin were among the artists whose exchanges helped shape the experiments of these years. That setting helps place the strong colour and altered landscape, though it does not prove that the mountain on this canvas is a measured portrait of a specific local summit. [7].
It is easy to confuse three things with “blue rider” in their names: the 1903 painting The Blue Rider, mounted figures in this 1908–09 Blue Mountain, and the Der Blaue Reiter group and almanac that formed in 1911. The group came later. The Guggenheim's teaching material recalls Kandinsky's explanation that he and Franz Marc both liked blue and rider imagery when choosing the name. That later account illuminates a recurring taste, but it should not be read backwards as if the 1908–09 canvas were a commissioned emblem for a group that had not yet been established. [1]; [7].
The chronology also prevents the painting from being explained only through the later almanac. Blue Mountain was a specific artistic decision in 1908–09: a large oil canvas with bright, broken colour and three recognisable riders. It is part of the background to the later group, but it deserves to be looked at on its own terms.
A different painting called Mountain
The Lenbachhaus holds Berg (Mountain), a 1909 Kandinsky oil on canvas, inventory GMS 54. Its museum text explicitly compares it with the Guggenheim's Blue Mountain. In the Lenbachhaus work, rider and mountain imagery is harder to separate from broad, nearly non-objective forms. The comparison is valuable precisely because these are different objects. The Munich museum's CC0 image of Berg cannot be substituted for the New York painting's image simply because both have a mountain and an approximate date. [6].
The difference between the two paintings offers a more careful way to discuss Kandinsky's experimentation. In one, three riders remain relatively clear beneath a brilliant mountain. In the other, related figures are much less immediately legible. Kandinsky was trying more than one degree of transformation during the same short period. A single story in which each year moves uniformly further from depiction would miss that variety. The two works make a better pair for close comparison than for merging into one chronology or image record.
Is this already abstract art?
The answer depends on what the question is asking. If “abstract” means a picture with no identifiable subject at all, Blue Mountain is not that: we can see riders, trees and a mountain, and the Guggenheim says the riders are clearly delineated. If it means a picture in which colour, brushwork and relationships among shapes are no longer bound to literal description, the painting is moving decisively in that direction. The museum describes it as part of Kandinsky's path towards abstraction. [2].
Keeping both parts in view is useful. Calling it simply a landscape can make the colour seem like a decorative exaggeration. Calling it fully nonrepresentational can erase the specific riders and the powerful way Kandinsky set them against the mountain. The painting works because the recognisable and the transformed remain in tension. It invites viewers to name what is there and then to notice how hard it is to reduce the whole experience to those names.
Nor is a viewer required to choose one hidden message for every form. The blue is certainly prominent, and Kandinsky later wrote extensively about colours' effects. Yet this canvas gives us observable relationships before it gives us a universal code: blue against red, a pale opening between trees, small horses against enormous foliage, and thick clusters of marks inside large shapes. Those relationships can be analysed without claiming private access to the artist's every intention.
Why Blue Mountain matters
Blue Mountain makes a transition visible without pretending that transitions are tidy. It carries older motifs of travel and story into a large oil painting whose colour and surface demand attention of their own. Three riders remain clear enough to anchor a scene; the trees and mountain nearly overwhelm them with warm and cool paint. The effect depends on neither subject alone nor formal experiment alone, but on the pressure between the two.
The painting also helps correct the habit of treating Kandinsky's career as a single sudden break. The Guggenheim presents his move towards abstraction as a course of experimentation. This canvas gives that course a particular shape and date. It is not an anonymous step on a ladder; it is a highly specific work in which a blue mountain, two differently coloured trees and three riders form an image that is memorable before any later theory is brought to it. [1]; [2].
Kandinsky artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum dates Blue Mountain (Der blaue Berg) to 1908–09. It is an oil on canvas measuring 106 × 96.6 cm, accession 41.505. [1].
It belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, as part of its Founding Collection. The museum's accession is 41.505. [3].
Three mounted figures are visible across the lower part of the canvas. Rider imagery became important in Kandinsky's work and has wider spiritual and apocalyptic associations in works from this period, but the cited sources do not identify each rider here as a named historical or biblical person. [1].
It retains recognisable mountain, tree and rider forms, while its strong non-natural colour and rhythmic brushwork move away from literal landscape description. The Guggenheim treats it as part of Kandinsky's development towards abstraction. [2].
No. Berg is a different Kandinsky oil painting made in 1909 and held by the Lenbachhaus in Munich, inventory GMS 54. Its museum record compares it with the Guggenheim's Blue Mountain; it does not identify them as one canvas. [6].
Discussion
What do you notice first in Blue Mountain? Share a close observation or a question about the evidence for this work.
Comments are for comparing what we see and what the cited sources establish.
Reader Insights
How do the yellow and red trees change the apparent size of the blue mountain?
What remains recognisable when you compare this canvas with Kandinsky’s earlier rider pictures?
How might seeing the separate 1909 Berg in person change the comparison?
Join the Conversation
Add your observation below and tell us which part of the artwork led you to it.
References
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kandinsky teaching materials, Blue Mountain object facts and 1908–14 context. View source.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “Kandinsky: The First Abstract Works”, museum interpretation of brushwork, riders and colour. View source.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle press kit, exhibition checklist and accession. View source.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, “Abstraction: Kandinsky's Vision of Utopia” lecture transcript, historical comparison with earlier work. View source.
- Museum of Modern Art, Kandinsky: Compositions, later composition context and three-rider motif. View source.
- Lenbachhaus, Berg collection record, separate 1909 comparison painting. View source.
- Lenbachhaus, Blue Rider history, Munich/Murnau circle and 1911 group chronology. View source.
- Lenbachhaus, Reitendes Paar, earlier rider comparison. View source.
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