Blue Mountain

In the lower portion of the painting, a group of riders on horseback race past the eponymous Blue Mountain. They are flanked by two large trees. The painting is completed in vivid, unrealistic colours: the riders are shown in a myriad of bright hues, one of the trees dressed in bright orange speckled with rainbow colours and the other is in deep purples and reds. The sky behind them swirls in reds, pinks, greens, and yellows. The piece bursts with loud colours, with our focus drawn to the central mountain and the off-white horses below. The horses are rearing on hind legs and this, combined with the bending of the right-hand tree towards the centre and the mind-bending combination of colours, gives a real sense of speed and excitement to the work. The image of the rider on horseback was seen frequently in Kandinsky’s work of this time. In 1909 he had painted at least seven other works featuring ‘the rider’. This image had become symbolic for the artist’s battle against traditional artforms and methods. As a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter and pioneer of Expressionism, Kandinsky rejected naturalistic depictions of real subject matter, turning instead to extreme colour and more abstracted forms to communicate feeling and concept.