Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter is often associated with her former colleague and lover, Wassily Kandinsky, but her contributions to 20th-century modernism merit recognition on their own. Primarily known as a painter and printmaker, she is commonly discussed within the context of German Expressionism and as a member of the renowned Blaue Reiter group.

Biography of Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter was born in Berlin in 1877 to Carl Friedrich Münter and Wilhelmine Scheuber. Her parents had met and married in America. The artist later recalled that her father was forced to move to America in 1848 to avoid arrest for advocating liberal and revolutionary ideas.

However, following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the family returned to Germany in December 1864. According to scholar Reinhold Heller, Münter's childhood was "absolutely ordinary," spent in the comfort and protection of a well-to-do, German middle-class home during a period of peace and relative prosperity in the early decades of the German Empire.

In 1886, Münter's father passed away, and her mother died in 1897, leaving Münter orphaned by the age of twenty. Along with her sister, Emmy, Münter used her inheritance to embark on a two-year journey across America, participating in cattle drives through Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. The sisters returned to Germany in 1900, where Münter, eager to pursue a career in art and to capture the American landscape and people she had experienced, began to refine her drawing and painting skills.

Münter began her artistic training in Düsseldorf shortly before her mother’s death. She took private lessons with painter Ernst Bosch and enrolled in the Ladies' School of the Düsseldorf Arts Academy. Between 1900 and 1902, Münter explored various artistic mediums, including sculpture, drawing, and painting, under different artists. 

In Munich, she studied at the Phalanx School with Wassily Kandinsky, who was also the school's chair at the time. Münter felt that Kandinsky, unlike her previous instructors, took her artistic ambitions seriously, noting that he "regarded me as a consciously striving human being." The two quickly developed a close personal relationship. Kandinsky, feeling "uncomfortable" with Münter’s presence alongside his first wife Anja, asked her to leave his class. By 1903, Münter and Kandinsky were secretly engaged, planning to marry once Kandinsky had secured a divorce. Although Kandinsky was officially divorced by 1911, the marriage never took place, much to Münter’s disappointment.

Between 1904 and 1907, Münter and Kandinsky traveled extensively throughout Europe and North Africa. Their travels were driven not by a quest for adventure or new painting subjects, but by Kandinsky's desire to escape the challenges of his personal situation and to test his relationship with Münter. During these itinerant years, the artist achieved significant aesthetic breakthroughs, her paintings evolving to feature thick, Post-Impressionistic brushstrokes and naturalistic landscapes.

By 1907, Münter began working in Paris, where she exhibited her paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and her prints at the Salon d'Automne. The following year, she held her first solo exhibition at the Kunstsalon Lenoble in Cologne, showcasing eighty of her paintings.

The collaborative relationship between Münter and Kandinsky became a defining feature of Münter's mature period, deeply influencing her work. In 1908, the couple moved to Munich, where they joined Russian émigrés Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej Jawlensky. That same year, they took a trip to Murnau in the Bavarian Alps, which sparked a lifelong bond between Münter and the town.

In 1909, Münter bought a house in Murnau with hopes of eventually turning it into a museum for her art. In Murnau, Münter and Kandinsky hosted avant-garde figures such as Franz Marc, August Macke, Jawlensky, von Werefkin, and Arnold Schoenberg. It was within this expanded artistic circle that Kandinsky began exploring abstract painting, while Münter experienced what she described as her "great leap" in artistic development.

Inspired by her surroundings and influenced by her peers, Münter painted with newfound vigor, creating up to five oil studies a day. Her work from this period is marked by formal simplicity, bold unmodulated colors, and a flattened perspective.

When World War I began in 1914, Münter and Kandinsky fled to Switzerland. The war naturally separated the two artists, who spent most of the conflict living apart. By September 1916, Kandinsky had returned to Russia and started a relationship with seventeen-year-old Nina Andrejewska. Nina became his second wife in 1917, a fact Münter did not learn until 1920. The two never met again, Münter made several attempts in the 1920s to contact Kandinsky and retrieve artworks still in his possession.

Scholar Annegret Hoberg views Münter's efforts as a symbolic quest for "moral amends" rather than "material compensation." In her pursuit, Münter compelled Kandinsky to acknowledge their relationship as a "marriage of conscience" rather than a legal union. Additionally, in 1925, she began writing Confession and Accusation, a text in which she criticized Kandinsky for his mistreatment.

Throughout this period, Münter's work remained firmly rooted in the German Expressionist style, and she continued to enjoy significant exhibition opportunities, particularly in Scandinavia and Germany. In 1917, she exhibited in Stockholm and engaged with the Swedish avant-garde. The following year, she held her largest exhibition to date in Copenhagen, and in 1919, she showcased her work at the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. By 1928, with her reputation firmly established, Münter began a relationship with art historian Johannes Eichner that lasted for the remainder of her life.

In the later years of her career, Münter faced significant challenges due to the artistic demands of National Socialism. By 1931-33, she had settled in Murnau with Johannes Eichner and organized a retrospective exhibition that toured Germany for two years. However, her progressive art was at odds with the aesthetic preferences of Adolf Hitler. Eichner advised Münter to adapt her style for greater market appeal, leading her to create more conventional still lifes and portraits to earn money or barter for essentials.

Despite her personal beliefs, Münter contributed to National Socialist exhibitions, submitting work for a 1936 Berlin Olympics project, displaying two paintings in the traveling exhibition "Adolf Hitler's Streets in Art," and offering pieces for the 1937 Great German Art Exhibition, though these were ultimately rejected. Her efforts to align with the Nazi artistic program were unsuccessful, and her art was condemned by Nazi officials in 1937. As a result, Münter took precautions to hide her collection of Blaue Reiter art in her basement to avoid its confiscation.

After World War II, cultural theorists celebrated artists and movements previously denigrated by Hitler as symbols of the regime’s downfall. As a result, in recognition of her contributions, the artist received the Culture Prize for Painting in 1956 and the Gold Medallion of Honor from the City of Munich in 1957. That same year, she donated much of her Blaue Reiter collection to the Städtische Galerie in Munich. Following Eichner's death in 1958, Gabriele Münter lived out her remaining years in Murnau, maintaining the attention of art historians and critics. She passed away in Murnau on May 19, 1962.

The Art of Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter's work, influenced by folk art and non-Western art, is marked by its vibrant, figurative, and abstract qualities, characterized by dramatic colors and loose brushstrokes. Post-Impressionistic landscapes marked by thick, vibrant brushstrokes became her signature style. What set Münter apart from her peers was her remarkable speed, she could often complete one or more large canvases in a single day.

True to the German Expressionist tradition of woodcutting, Münter was deeply involved in printmaking. Her linocuts blended naturalism and abstraction: her portraits, for instance, were noted for their detailed depiction of sitters set against abstract backgrounds.

Münter's still lifes, often dismissed by many male avant-gardists as a "woman's genre," were distinctive within German Expressionism. She incorporated folk objects, many of which she collected during her travels, and selected them for their color and tonal relationships

In the mid-1930s, the artist's political stance was questioned when she submitted safer figurative works — likely out of self-preservation — to the National Socialist project, although her art was ultimately rejected by the Nazis. In the post-war period, her work was re-evaluated, and she has since been recognized as a significant link between the pre-war and post-war German avant-garde.

Münter and Kandinsky: From NKVM to Der Blaue Reiter

In 1909, Münter and Kandinsky co-founded the New Artists' Association Munich (NKVM), which showcased and promoted international avant-garde art, featuring works by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and André Derain. At the NKVM's inaugural exhibition, Münter's work received high praise, with one critic lauding her woodcuts as "first class, completely lovely" and "full of genuine lyrical magic." This success prompted Münter to collect folk art, particularly reverse-glass paintings known as Hinterglasmalerei, an interest that also influenced Kandinsky.

The NKVM was a stepping stone to the establishment of Der Blaue Reiter in 1911, a prominent German Expressionist group that Münter, Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Marc's wife Maria, and Alfred Kubin founded. This group was inspired by various influences: the dramatic colors and loose brushstrokes of the Fauves, the Germanic print tradition and thickly outlined forms of the Die Brücke group, the Wagnerian concept of a gesamtkunstwerk, studies in synesthesia, and the richness of international folk and non-Western art. Münter and her Blaue Reiter colleagues produced evocative and innovative works, marking a significant moment in avant-garde art.