Magazine: Summer 2012

Gabriele Münter was born in an era of new possibilities for women, yet in Germany there was still resistance to women artists. Ineligible for the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, she enrolled instead at the Painting School for Women in 1897. After the deaths of her parents, Münter and her sister spent 1898 to 1900 visiting American relatives. With a substantial inheritance, Münter lived independently upon returning to Germany and in 1901 moved to Munich to attend the Women’s Art School. The next year, she transferred to the more progressive Phalanx School, where she studied with the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). Following classes in still-life painting, she was invited in the summers of 1902 and 1903 to join his landscape painting classes, held in country towns. The relationship between teacher and student progressed from friendship to love affair. Although Kandinsky had a wife in Russia, Münter and Kandinsky became engaged. It was an artistic partnership as well as a personal one: Kandinsky urged Münter to paint, although she sometimes had doubts about her career. From 1904 to 1908 the couple traveled in Europe and North Africa before returning to Munich. Fisherman’s House dates from this era. Its bright colors and geometric, abstracted shapes show the influence of the folk art that Münter liked and collected, especially Bavarian reverse paintings on glass. During this period, Münter purchased a house in Murnau and she and Kandinsky divided their time between the small town and Munich. Artists from the New Artists’ Association Munich (NKVM) met in Murnau. In Kandinsky and Erma Bossi, Münter evokes that period, showing Kandinsky in animated discussion with one of the few other women artists of the group. In 1911, Kandinsky, Münter, and Franz Marc (1880–1916) left the relatively conservative NKVM to form a new group, the Blue Rider, leading to a short-lived movement of the same name that produced some of the most vibrant art in German modernism. That same year Kandinsky and his wife divorced, but there were tensions in his relationship with Münter and they did not marry. During his Munich years Kandinsky continued to exhibit in Russia, and when war broke out in 1914 he returned home as an “enemy alien” and settled there. In 1915–16 he traveled to Scandinavia—neutral territory—where he met Münter but then returned to Russia. Kandinsky married a Russian woman and he and Münter never met again. From Norway (Tjellebotten) recalls children’s drawings and is less bold than Münter’s earlier, expressionistic creations. For some years in the 1920s, Münter ceased painting altogether. Her new companion, the art historian Johannes Eichner, encouraged her to paint, however, and, late in that decade, she took up the brush again. In the post–World War II years, Münter returned to her house in Murnau and found intact the cache of her own paintings and works by her fellow artists that she had hidden there. The survival of these works seemed miraculous given that the Nazis had considered members of the Blue Rider group to be “degenerate artists” and many of their works were lost. Having outlived the majority of the artists of her early milieu, Gabriele Münter became a living symbol of the daring artistic breakthroughs and achievements of modernist artists in pre–World War I Germany and was much honored. More recently, feminist art historians have championed her.