Approaching the Tate Modern to see the Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider exhibition, I knew what to expect when visiting a mainstream cultural institution in the Current Year. But I had an idea about how to make it bearable, borrowing a strategy from the same generation of artists whose work I was going to see: inner emigration. 

Inward émigrés entering a mainstream cultural institution thus dissociate … from all the messaging and ideological posturing

Inner emigration describes, not those literally in exile from their home country, but  those inwardly exiled from it — whose souls are separated, alienated or distant from its direction of travel, its cultural slogans, and its dominant preoccupations. Inward émigrés entering a mainstream cultural institution thus dissociate, quietly, from all the messaging and ideological posturing that such institutions now so enthusiastically delight in.

The inner exile chooses not to dwell on the fact these institutions are run by people occupying a narrow ideological space, who are so unthinking as to assume everyone else agrees with them. Likewise for the fact arts funding and career progression reward ideological game-playing and punish curiosity and originality. 

The inner exile similarly disavows to reflect on those who, having received an ideological conveyer belt education in the arts, make that ideology the only frame of reference for everything else. 

Having chosen not to think about any of these things so I could have a pleasant afternoon, I was excited about seeing works by The Blue Rider group of artists, an early 20th century collective from Munich which included Walter Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Paul Klee, August Macke, and so on. They are associated with the birth of German Expressionism, early Abstraction, and a host of other modernist projects. 

In terms of the quality of the works of art in the exhibition, it is second-to-none. The inner exile can enjoy these and feel surprisingly at home. In terms of the accompanying commentary, however, the inner exile must work hard to block his eyes and ears from the messaging which is as loud as it is absurd and inaccurate.

The international character of the artists was linked with their “experiences of migration and displacement”, neither of which I could detect in the works themselves. There was a quote from an early mission statement of the group in the same vein: 

In our case the principle of internationalism is the only one possible… art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity. 

An accomplished inner exile would not do what I did — which was to look up the original text. A missing sentence seemed telling, for without it “internationalism” sounds more like globalism, and is made to sound like the slogan, “No Borders!”. The original reads: 

…the principle of internationalism is the only one possible…Like the personal, the national is automatically reflected in each great work.

An inner exile would similarly not have wondered why the name of this exhibition includes Gabriele Münter. She was undoubtedly hugely important to the group, but so were a great many others. The commentary made the reasons clear, nonetheless. The group was described as “progressive for its time” in admitting women, a point repeated again and again throughout.  

Maybe the inner exile should hereby work harder not to notice this stuff. After all, I love Münter’s paintings. There aren’t very many of them around, though, which is perhaps why some photographs she took on a trip to the USA were also included, to pad things out. I can’t speak authoritatively on the artistic merit of these photos, but the commentary didn’t speak of that merit either, just telling us that Münter used the photos to reflect on “gender and racial tension”.

The inner exile should stop himself asking to what degree the word “gender”, a mid-20th century term, can really apply to art from 1900. But if the inner exile allowed himself to notice one anachronism, others would become all the more apparent. For the commentary referenced how the artists included “those exploring their gender identities” and playing with “gender fluidity”. This latter term doesn’t enter the lexicon till the 1980s, and then very sparingly until the last decade or so. 

One of the few examples on display was a drag-esque portrait of the theatre performer Alexander Sacharoff. Strangely, despite a paucity of examples, the theme was given an entire room’s display, in which the commentary talked about the artists “resenting gender binaries” and “radically disrupting gender norms”. There certainly were elements at play which might link to what we today describe in these terms. But the inner exile has to avoid noticing how wrong it is to assume that context and ours are the same, and that such issues then occupied anything like the same amount of headspace they do today. 

Perhaps the inner exile should have just turned to less contentious elements of the exhibition, like the artists being described as “engaging in environmental issues and searching for new forms of spirituality”. Yet the first of these was, again, barely perceptible. Yes, Marc’s animalist works seek to penetrate into the very spirit of nature through a process he described as “trying to feel…the quivering and the flow of blood” in “trees, animals, the air”, but this hardly makes him Greta Thunberg.  

When it comes to “searching for new spiritualities”, however, here I was genuinely surprised. I was surprised by how much of the work used Christian imagery, iconography, and themes. I had no idea that these painters did so many biblical scenes, images of saints, and copies of the pious folk-art of rural Bavaria. Oddly, while the names of these images were clear to see, the commentary didn’t mention their Christian religious context. But fear not, for there was a lot about a couple of other pieces, far fewer in number, which showed how “the artists engaged with diverse structures and systems of belief”, and how Marc developed an “interest in Buddhism”. 

My attempt at inner emigration thus decisively failed, and I hadn’t even got to the room about how these artists’ interest in the link between sound and colour suggested a concern with “neurodiversity”, the most egregious anachronism yet.

I would recommend seeing the exhibition all the same. If you can be a better inner exile than I, you may notice how elements of the modernist art of this period draws on long-standing tradition in innovative ways, especially when it comes to technology. Here the art shares much with the sort of reactionary modernism you see in people like W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, T.S Elliot, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Jünger — a sort of romanticism resurfacing through the vastly changed conditions of the contemporary world. This in itself would have made an original theme for the exhibition’s commentary, if only the curators had allowed themselves to see it.