Such clear ambitions, however, are often disappointingly lost in the course of a sprawling show. The problem is immediately apparent in the opening room. On the one hand you have Wassily Kandinsky's Riding Couple, that jewelled colour which is to characterise the Blue Rider's output leaping out of the canvas. Its folk art inspirations, heavy dotted technique and linear clarity propel you forward into the rest of the exhibition. Yet, alongside this, there is a cul de sac wall of Gabriel Münter's North American photographs: the connection is tenuous, the curators' main aim seems to be position their two 'names' alongside each other.
The first two rooms emphasise these strengths and weaknesses. They are brimful of wonderful paintings but their inclusion is justified by passing friendships, social connections and coincidences of geography rather than aesthetic concerns. The melting pot argument is a persuasive one, and I am all for debunking over-categorisation, but it is easy for everything to descend into a gossipy muddle. Robert Delaunay is never more than a friend of a friend, although his inclusion is justifiable on stylistic grounds. Paul Klee is remembered as a keen violinist who argued with Kandinsky but his art is a peripheral add-on. We get a random section of photographs illustrating the 'Western gaze' thrown in for good measure. There is little chronology, with works dotting about between 1903 and 1916; little sense of how and why these artists influenced each other. Does it matter? Perhaps not. Marianne Werefkin's Self Portrait, August Macke's Promenade, Albert Bloch's Prize Fight: these paintings pack a punch in their own right.
The exhibition meanders through twelve rooms in a similar stop-start style. We have a digression to North Africa, an odd (not very) interactive investigation of optics, a corridor-like display of 'artist as collector'. 'Performing Gender' seems just there as a bit of virtual signalling - there are interesting observations to be made but it feels forced to include, for instance, Werefkin's Skaters here. We wait a long time to see the actual Blue Rider almanac and I'm not sure it's really the grand finale the exhibition deserves. The most successful rooms are the most focused: on Murnau, on 'The Inner Necessity of Art'. The incorporation of sound, specifically the impact that a concert of Schoenberg's music had on Kandinsky, works well but but feels underexploited.
What the exhibition does best, perhaps unintentionally, is to highlight how badly served the Blue Rider (like much else) has been by traditional art history. Here, the big names are not the ones you will remember. Franz Marc's Tiger is too prissy, too frozen in it's futurist jungle to be fearsome. Kandinsky's slide towards abstraction produces canvases of fussy calligraphic confusion which have none of the impact of his earlier landscapes. But you will see Werefkin's Red Tree in your dreams; her Storm a haunting nightmare. The self-composed solidity of Elisabeth Epstein's self portrait combines the monumental and the deeply personal. Wladimir Burljuk's sinewy cubo-futurism writhes with life. You can smell the crisp freshness in Münter's outdoor portrait of Werefkin and Jawlensky, whilst her jaunty portraits of him, pink, fat and gleaming, and a leg-warmer-sporting Kandinsky debunk their status with the observational wit of the best caricaturist.
Sometimes infuriating, definitely in need of pruning, Expressionists is still full of life and love and colour. It is impossible to look at these paintings and their creators through the doleful lens of the First World War, as so many traditional narratives tend to. No poignant nostalgia here. There's too much exuberance, optimism, experimentation and sheer joie de vivre. Perhaps that makes the Blue Rider less 'modernist' but it makes the works so much more compelling. You leave with a spring in your step and a renewed determination seek out new narratives, new artists and ways of thinking about early 20th century art.
