Zwei Reiter vor Rot (Two Riders Against a Red Backround)

The evocative horse and rider in this print was a significant motif for Vasily Kandinsky that represented his path toward abandoning objective representation in favor of an expressive, spiritual abstraction. In 1911 he and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of artists in Germany who sought to express inner nature and spiritual experience within their art. Two Riders Before Red is one of fifty-seven woodcuts included in Kandinsky’s influential book Sounds.