Gabriele Münter
Gabriele Münter was born in Berlin in 1877. Among the artist's earliest works are those that document a trip she made to visit American relatives from 1898 to 1900. Upon her return to Munich, she entered the Women's Art School, since the doors of the famed Royal Bavarian Academy were closed to women. In 1902, she entered the newly opened Phalanx School, intent on studying sculpture. However, sire was soon encouraged by the director of the school, Russian emigre Wassily Kandinsky, to pursue drawing and painting. Her encounters with Kandinsky marked a decisive shift in her artistic development and ultimately led to a personal relationship between them, which lasted until 1914. From 1908 until 1914, Münter and Kandinsky traveled regularly between Munich , where they moved in advanced literary and artistic circles, and Murnau am Staffelsee, a village in the Bavarian Alps. Kandinsky was a dynamic force in the formation of the Blue Rider group, with which Münter was sympathetic . But she did not entirely embrace Kandinsky's approach to nonobjective painting. Instead her work reflects the strong linear structure and intense color she admired in the Bavarian folk craft of painting on glass. Her impulse to paint was prompted by acute observation of her environment, expressed in a confident and liberated use of boldly direct color and simplified form.
In 1914, with the onset of World War I, Milnter moved to Sweden with the intention of later meeting Kandinsky, who had returned to Russia. Kandinsky and Münter were to see each other only once more, in 1916 in Stockholm, where they were both having exhibitions. The severing of her ties with Kandinsky and other colleagues had such an effect on Milnter that she withdrew completely from public art life, remaining alone in Scandinavia until 1920, when she returned to Germany. After 1930, Münter's life became more settled, and she took up residence once again in Murnau, living with Dr. Johannes Eichner, an art historian. She reveals in her second Murnau period a style of painting analogous to her early work, although only a faint expression of the spiritual climate of the Blue Rider movement is evident. In the 1930s, her works were exhibited throughout Germany, but with the rise of the Nazis she was denounced as a degenerate artist. She continued to work secluded in Murnau, and in the 1950s was reclaimed as Germany's most important living artist. She died in 1962.
The self-portrait, painted about 1908-09, shows the artist standing in front of an easel, palette and brushes in hand, wearing a large brimmed hat trimmed with flowers. It is the earliest of such portraits in this genre, and the naturalistic likeness is something of a departure from the more abstract style the artist was pursuing at the time.
