GLENN LOWRY:: In 1911, around the same time the Brücke artists were working, another Expressionist group formed in Munich: the Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider. For founders Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the horse and rider had romantic associations related to German and Russian medieval knights, saints, and folklore. But the horse-and-rider motif ultimately became a symbol of the shift from representation to abstraction.
STARR FIGURA:: What you're looking at here is a book by Kandinsky. It's titled Klänge, which means "sounds" and it includes 56 woodcuts that he created over a period of five years from 1907 to 1912. And this was an incredibly formative period in Kandinsky's career. Kandinsky talked about how woodcut helped him to simplify his style and to make his works, including his paintings, more abstract.
You can see how his imagery alternated between more representational and more abstract, and also more sort of lyrical and romantic, and almost apocalyptic.
Kandinsky is known as the first artist to make a completely abstract painting. And these years were basically the period in which he slowly evolved towards that end.