Blaue Reiter, Der (German for “The Blue Rider”), informal association of expressionist artists founded in Munich, Germany, in 1911. The leading members were the Russians Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky; the Germans Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Münter; and the Swiss Paul Klee. Other Russians, as well as cubist and fauve artists from Paris, were invited to exhibit with them. They took their name from Marc’s paintings of blue horses and Kandinsky’s of riders dressed in blue. Like the contemporary expressionist group Die Brücke in Berlin, who also exhibited with them, Der Blaue Reiter rejected convention and sought self-expression, but they were international in scope and had no characteristic style. Their common bond was a desire to express their “inner impulses,” as their catalog put it. The group dissolved with the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), but its influence continued through the Bauhaus School, where both Kandinsky and Klee later taught.