Out of the Shadows – Art & Antiques Magazine

Gabriele Münter was a spirited champion of the avant-garde in Germany, a brilliant draftswoman, and a daring colorist

ByAshley Busby

In a diary entry from 1926, Expressionist painter and artist Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) ruminated on her continued position on the periphery of the art world, noting: “In the eyes of many, I was nothing but an unnecessary addition to Kandinsky. That a woman can have an original, real talent, that she can be a creative person, is easily forgotten. A woman standing alone—even one of my kind—can never assert herself without help. Other ‘authorities’ have to advocate on her behalf.”  Münter well understood that her very ability to have a career was predicated on her association with her more celebrated former partner.  Nevertheless, during the 14 years Münter and Kandinsky spent together, as well as the many decades after their split, the artist navigated an unflinching creative life all her own.

“Gabriele Münter: Retrospective,” an exhibition at Vienna’s Leopold Museum, opening October 20^th and running through February 18^th of next year, features over 120 of the artist’s works.  Now is the time for us to see Münter and her oeuvre in a new light, and—in the words of one catalog essayist—to allow her to move beyond “the long shadow cast” by Kandinsky.

Born in Berlin in 1877, Münter showed an early interest in drawing.  Having lost her father in childhood, young Gabriele and her sister benefited from a sizeable inheritance that allowed both of them the relative freedom to pursue their passions.  In 1897, Münter moved to Düsseldorf to begin training as an artist.  Unable to attend classes at the male-only Academy, she enrolled at the city’s Ladies’ School and pursued private lessons with a local genre painter.  Unfortunately, her studies were cut short by the death of her mother that same year.  Newly orphaned, she and her sister sought solace in the company of distant family members, as they travelled for the next two years throughout the United States.

By 1901, Münter had moved to Munich, intent on continuing her education.  Barred from attending the city’s art academy, the young artist initially enrolled in drawing classes at the Munich Association for Women Artists.  Later that same year, she transferred to classes sponsored by Phalanx, a new progressive group of artists that had been established as an alternative to the academicism in Munich’s art scene.  A 1902 summer painting course with Kandinsky changed her life irrevocably.  Not only did her work as an artist begin to blossom, but also she and Kandinsky found themselves immediately drawn to each other, creatively and intimately.

In Münter, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), the Russian-born artist who became revered as a master of abstract painting, found a sort of creative opposite.  Her innate talent in drawing countered his own skills in color, and her compositional strengths bolstered his own early career deficiencies.  While Kandinsky would later be remembered as a genius and avant-garde initiator, his own artistic development happened with Münter.  Theirs was no simple teacher/pupil relationship but rather a shared partnership.  Kandinsky confirmed Münter’s importance in a 1905 letter to the artist, writing, “A lot depends on you.  You alone cannot do everything, but it is only through you that I can achieve truly great things.”

The two artists embarked upon a secret love affair and eventual engagement, even though Kandinsky—just over 10 years older than Münter—was already married.  Despite their closeness, Kandinsky refused to divorce until 1911, infusing their relationship with tension as Kandinsky split his time between his creative paramour and his legal wife.

Promenade (Promenade on the Seine), c. 1904–1906, oil on cardboard, 15.9 x 17.9 cm.
Kunsthalle Emden. Photo: bpk/Kunsthalle Emden/Martinus Ekkenga © Bildrecht, Wien, 2023.

Over the next several years, utilizing the funds from her family estate, they traveled through Europe and North Africa.  Time spent taking in the varied artistic traditions to which they were exposed had an immediate impact on Münter’s approach to painting.  A photograph from 1903, made by Kandinsky, shows her standing on a bridge in the quaint Bavarian town of Kallmünz; Münter stares confidently at the camera, a large canvas in her hand and a rucksack of supplies draped over her shoulder.

An early oil on cardboard composition entitled Promenade on the Seine (c. 1904–1906) reads as an amalgam of fin de siècle French painting and its impact on her development.  The ladies garbed in white seem drawn from a late Monet, while the bold, yet naturalistic, hues of the surrounding waterway and rolling hills are a unique amalgam of the palette and simplification of form seen in the work of Synthetist artists such as Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, as well as in the creations of the Fauves.

By 1908, Kandinsky and Münter returned to Munich and soon joined forces with another artist pairing, Russian émigrés Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky.  They worked to form the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM or “New Artists’ Association of Munich”) in 1909, and later, with the help of Franz Marc, the pioneering Expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) around 1911.

From its start, Münter was a key figure in Der Blaue Reiter, helping to organize the group’s written and curatorial legacy, while regularly exhibiting her work.  Historically speaking, however, Kandinsky and Marc are remembered as the sole progenitors of the movement.  Their reception at the time, though, was more modest.  All members of Der Blaue Reiter faced a tepid—and even vehement—press reception.  One critic likened them to a “horde of color-splashing howler monkeys,” and Münter was often derided for what was seen as a childlike approach.  To her credit, scholar Gisela Kleine recognizes Münter’s bravery, arguing that “to subject herself to abuse and ridicule” all in her dedication to avant-garde praxis “was a sign of great courage.”

Around 1909, Münter and Kandinsky established a creative base outside Munich at a cottage that Münter purchased in the small village of Murnau.  This rural retreat remained a constant in her life long after her relationship with Kandinsky dissolved.  She found comfort in the surrounding landscape, and the village served as her primary residence from the mid-1930s until her death in 1962.  While in Murnau, Münter was exposed to and acquired a large collection of traditional Bavarian-style hinterglasmalerei, or reverse glass paintings.

With origins in the Middle Ages, the practice was first introduced in Germany in the 16^th century.  The technique involves painting on the opposite side of the glass, building up layers of paint starting not with the background but rather the final details.  It requires a high level of compositional prowess, which certainly would have been achieved through Münter’s skills as a draftswoman.  Bavarian-style glass paintings often featured peasant motifs and sacral imagery.  Practitioners in the area tended toward a simplification of form and space with color in bold washes broken up by simple contour lines that matched Münter’s own growing artistic sensibilities.

While the artist also produced her own reverse glass paintings, the tradition had a lasting impact on her overall visual practice.  This influence can be seen in a stunning oil on canvas painting from her later career, The Blue Lake (1934).  Here, she depicts Lake Staffelsee—located close to her Murnau cottage—in a masterful execution of color and simplified forms.  A heavy, dark outline bears a connection not only to local glass painters but also the Synthetist approach that had impacted her early career compositions.  Rolling, grassy planes interspersed with sentinel-like trees in rich greens and deep umber fill the foreground, creating a frame for the titular, vivid blue lake.  On the far shore, violet-hued mountains rise up toward a block of sunset-tinged clouds in brilliant cadmium yellow.  A clear artistic vision shines through.

Münter maintained a lifelong, unwavering dedication to form, insisting that the same level of spiritual messaging or the invisible forces championed by Kandinsky was only possible in the visible.   In an interview at the end of her life she noted, “I will never dispense entirely with nature.  You cannot compete with God after all.”

By 1914, as war broke out, Kandinsky returned to Moscow.  In 1916, Münter, then in Stockholm, urged a supportive gallerist to show Kandinsky’s work.  While the two briefly reunited as they prepared the exhibition, he left the city not long after the opening and never saw his partner again.  He married another woman in 1917 and only contacted Münter to demand the return of art that she had housed during WWI.  Heartbroken over the lost relationship, she refused.  A protracted legal battle ensued, and in 1926 the court ruled in her favor.  Münter’s custodianship of the work eventually saved much of Kandinsky’s early-career work from destruction at the hands of the Nazis.  She hid this work along with others by her Expressionist peers in the basement of her Murnau home.  In 1957 she donated the collection to Munich’s Lenbachhaus.  Her generosity led to her receipt of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany not for her work as an artist but rather her role as cultural benefactor.

The Blue Lake, 1934, oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm.
Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz. Photo: LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz/Reinhard Haider © Bildrecht, Wien, 2023.

In the decades after her split from Kandinsky, Münter’s career evolved in fits and starts.  In 1927 she met art historian Johannes Eichner, with whom she would spend the next three decades (until his death in 1958).  Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Eichner dedicated himself to protecting Münter, encouraging her to make creative choices that fostered self-preservation above all else. Eichner successfully argued that the perceived naïveté in her work had more in common with the Reich’s interest in Germanic folklore than her actual avant-garde origins.  By this point, Münter had no work in German museums and her name had largely been forgotten in connection with Der Blaue Reiter.

When the 1937 Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition debuted in Munich, her expressionist peers were featured prominently, but the assemblage included no works by Münter.  Her obscurity, despite the safety it signaled for her continued career, stung; apparently, her early vision and contributions had been forgotten.  After the conclusion of the war, the artist saw some renewed attention in the form of exhibitions dedicated to Der Blaue Reiter.  Even so, she always felt that she never received adequate recognition for her own works and her collaboration with—not to mention impact upon the careers of—Kandinsky and others.

As she steps out of the shadows of her male peers at the Leopold’s new exhibition, we are given an opportunity to recognize Gabriele Münter’s brilliance, not as pupil, lover, or follower, but as a headstrong proponent of her own modernist voice and vision.