Navigating the frenetic years between the end of the 19th century and First World War is a curatorial challenge, given that so many avant-garde movements were competing for prominence.

Tate Modern’s 12-room “Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” argues for a pivotal position for the artistic movements centred around pre-1914 Munich. The genesis of the Blue Rider collective lay in the formation in 1909 of the NKVD (New Artists Association of Munich), which, progressively for its time, accepted women members, enabling them to exhibit and sell work. The Blue Rider was formed two years later, named after a 1903 painting by Wassily Kandinsky which depicted a horseman in impressionistic style casting a blue shadow on an autumn landscape of greens and gold. In the Blue Rider member Franz Marc’s colour theory, blue symbolised masculinity and spirituality.

The artists’ Christian backgrounds shine through their work. Kandinsky came from a Russian Orthodox family, and the symbolism of saints and icons is a repeated motif. Kandinsky’s 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art presented a vision for a new “great spiritual” age in which all art forms would coalesce. Franz Marc (1880-1916) abandoned training for the priesthood to enrol at the Munich Academy of Art, and then exchanged the Academy’s rigidity for travel and study in France. Marc said of his spirituality: “Although I have been an artist all my life, as a result of my upbringing and environment and my own inclinations, I have also been half cleric and half philologist.”

Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, AsconaMarianne Werefkin, The Prayer (1910)  

Maria Franck-Marc, Marc’s partner, painted Three Wise Men (1911), a golden fairytale version of Epiphany, with three gold-clad figures heralding the wise men, who ride on elephants and camels, in the background. Orphaned at 21, Münter came from an upper-class Protestant family, and used her wealth and independence to become an artist and patron. She was Kandinsky’s pupil and then his partner. Alexej Jawlensky and patron Marianne Werefkin shared a Russian Orthodox upbringing.

Munich offered a relatively liberal setting for artistic émigrés from the Russian and Habsburg empires. And the influence of Bavarian Catholicism is apparent in the artists’ work and collecting. Settling in Murnau, in the foothills of Bavarian alps, Kandinsky painted Murnau with Church I (1910), with a characteristic Bavarian onion dome in blue atop a blue-outlined white tower. The forms of the lower church building merge with the multi-coloured landscape.

Murnau’s rural landscape enchanted Kandinsky, after four years of travelling in Europe and North Africa, and may have inspired his move towards abstraction. Münter’s Grave Crosses in Kochel (1909) makes angular plain crosses and crucifixes compositional elements, casting blue shadows on undulating snow. Werefkin’s The Prayer (1910), painted in tempera on cardboard, shows a genuflecting couple at a roadside shrine, overawed by the surrounding green, brown, and mauve hills, and grey-white, molar-like mountain peaks in the background.

From 1911 to 1914, Kandinsky created detailed compositions concerned with the end of mankind. In All Saints I (1911), a white-dressed figure is surrounded by a tumult of simplified horses and thickly outlined limbs. In St George III (1911), the only distinct element is the saint’s thick black spear, as dragon, horse, and landscape dissolve into one.

Improvisation Deluge (1913) and On the Theme of the Deluge (1913-14) show the end of the world as a whirlwind of rainbow shapes and dark marks. Marc’s Doe in the Monastery Garden (1913) is a beautiful reordering of a landscape into prismatic shapes, with a curving, dotted beige doe, seen from above, at the centre. Killed at Verdun, Franc was the group’s most gifted artist, and his Tiger (1912) is understandably the poster image of the show. The markings of the coiled animal blend perfectly with the primary-coloured setting.

Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957  Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation Deluge (1913)

Collecting folk art was a step towards an art without borders for the Blue Rider group. Münter and Kandinsky collected votive paintings as motifs for their work, and the cabinet of devotional art by unknown artists is a delight. Dove of the Holy Spirit (mid-19th century) is a joyous wooden flat-billed dove, with outstretched wings, horizontally striped in gold, and a circular halo of gold-tipped tail feathers, made from thin strips of wood. Accident with a Wagon (1842) is related to the image of Our Lady in St Nicholas’s, Murnau. The top half of the panel painting shows the Queen of Heaven, dressed in blue and gold, with a sunray pattern of blue and gold surrounding her crown, seated on a thrown, feet obscured in black clouds. The base of the plane shows two red horses, wagonmaster and wagon, with a flattened red torso emerging from the rear wheel. Murnau’s church has a range of panels showing miracles and deliverances.

Münter’s Madonna with Poinsettia (1911) contrasts the intense blue and gold of a figure of the Virgin with the more muted tones of the flower, vase, and tablecloth.

Viewing the Tate’s Expressionists can feel like swimming against the tide, as the wall text spotlights the artists’ interests in Theosophy and pantheism, while the paintings abundantly display symbols of Christianity.

“Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1, until 20 October. Phone 020 7887 8888. www.tate.org.uk