After Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc met in early 1911, they decided to jointly publish a programmatic annual journal on current art developments. In doing so, they wanted to transcend genre boundaries as well as temporal and spatial distances or the separation of the various arts. Franz Marc explained the content of the almanac with the following words: “The book […] covers the latest painting movement in France, Germany and Russia and shows its fine connections with the Gothic and the primitive, with Africa and the great Orient, with the expressive original folk art and children's art, especially with the most modern musical movement in Europe and the new stage ideas of our time.” For the almanac, published in 1912 by the Munich-based Piper Verlag, the two editors placed texts about art and music, drafts for a play and musical compositions by Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern next to each other and illustrated them with 141 images from various stylistic periods. According to the almanac, this comparative comparison of the works of art should make it clear that "what is actually artistic (...) is not a question of form, but of artistic content." Form can therefore vary extremely if it only conveys a spiritual content. If you read Kandinsky's contribution further, it becomes clear that the almanac itself should set in motion a similar, almost meditative process to that of art: "If the reader of this book is able to rid himself of his wishes, his thoughts, his feelings, and then leafs through the book, moving from a votive painting to Delaunay, and then from a Cézanne to a Russian folk print, from a mask to Picasso, from a glass picture to Kubin, etc., etc., his soul will experience many vibrations and enter the realm of art." Kandinsky produced eleven designs for the cover of the almanac in quick succession until he finally decided on a stylized depiction of Saint George. In Christian iconography, the dragon slayer is seen as the conqueror of evil. This corresponded to Kandinsky's sense of mission and his conviction that modern man in the materialistic world is no longer part of a unified creation - and that only art can lead him back to the spiritual. The shield-armed saint with the striking headdress sits on a rearing horse. Beneath him winds the already defeated dragon, its scaly tail stretching up behind the rider's back. In the bottom right corner, the chained princess looks up at him. Kandinsky abstracts the motif almost to the point of complete dissolution. At the same time, the expressive faces and the strong contour lines show the influence of the popular reverse glass painting that the painters around the "Blue Rider" in Murnau had discovered for themselves. Kandinsky wrote about the color blue, which was used to color the woodcut, in his 1910 essay “On the Spiritual in Art”: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more deeply it calls people into the infinite, awakening in them a longing for the pure and ultimately the supernatural. It is the color of heaven.” As the Blue Rider, Saint George becomes the bearer of a message of salvation and the avant-garde pioneer of modernity.