Gabriele Münter
Gabriele Münter was born in Berlin in 1877, the youngest of five children in a middle-class Protestant family. Although artistic careers for women were generally discouraged at the time, her parents supported her passion for drawing and even hired a private tutor. At 20, Münter began studying at Ernst Bosch's studio in Düsseldorf, and then at the city's Women's School.
In 1898, Münter and her sister, who had inherited a substantial fortune from their deceased parents, traveled to the United States. The sisters spent two years there, traveling through Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas. Münter acquired a Kodak camera, took a lot of photographs, and, of course, drew.
Returning to Germany, Gabriele struggled to find a place to study further—few art schools accepted women. Finally, in 1902, she received an offer to join the Union of Women Artists in Munich. There, after visiting an exhibition of the Phalanx group and the school of the same name, she decided to enroll in two classes at once: Hüsgen's sculpture class and Wassily Kandinsky's painting class.
When Gabriele first appeared in Kandinsky's class, she was 25 years old, he was 36. At that time, he had been married for ten years. Kandinsky attracted Münter as a bright and unconventional teacher. In her diaries, she wrote that he perceived her as an individual with conscious creative aspirations. Thus began their friendship, a creative partnership, and a deep spiritual connection that eventually blossomed into love. In 1903, they became engaged and began a life full of travel. During this time, Kandinsky created a number of Post-Impressionist works, including two portraits of Gabriele—in 1903 and 1905. The first depicted her at her easel, painting from life in a courtyard strewn with autumn leaves. The second, created two years later, depicted a serious, pensive woman, whose eyes revealed depth, love, sadness, and a silent dialogue with both artist and viewer.
In the summer of 1906, they rented a house in Paris. Kandinsky felt out of place in the city and wanted to leave, while Münter, by contrast, longed to stay. She enrolled in a drawing course, and it was in Paris that her painting developed its own distinctive tone and style. The couple spent the summer of 1908 together in the town of Murnau in Bavaria. This summer became a turning point in Kandinsky's work, marking the beginning of his abstractionist phase. The following year, Kandinsky and Münter bought a house in Murnau and lived there openly. This was an active creative period for both, and gradually their romantic relationship transformed into a union of two like-minded artists.
Münter was not simply Kandinsky's companion, but a key figure in German Expressionism. It was in Murnau that she made that "great leap," about which she would later write: "After a brief period of agony, I took a great step forward—from copying nature, more or less impressionistically, to a sense of the content of things, to abstraction, to conveying the essence." She abandons the palette knife and impasto technique in favor of broad brushes and pure colors, unmixed on the palette. The space on her canvases becomes flat, perspective gives way to decorativeness, and contours acquire a rigidity reminiscent of Bavarian folk painting on glass (Hinterglasmalerei). She remains faithful to figuration while her Blue Rider colleagues increasingly move toward abstraction. People, houses, trees, dishes on the table—in her works, all are recognizable, yet imbued with new life.
In 1911, Kandinsky divorced Anna Chemyakina. With the outbreak of World War I, the couple moved to Switzerland, and then Kandinsky went to Moscow. In the winter of 1915, they met again in Stockholm, and in the spring of 1916, he returned to Moscow, where in the winter of 1917 he married Nina Andreevskaya. It was only in 1921 that Kandinsky contacted her through a lawyer, asking for the return of his belongings and works.
After separating from Kandinsky, Münter temporarily abandoned painting, exploring other pursuits. She returned to painting in 1927. During the Nazi era, when abstract art was declared "degenerate," Münter hid Kandinsky's archive and works in the basement of her home, risking her own safety. In 1957, Münter donated the archive to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. Gabriele Münter died in 1962, leaving behind more than 2,000 paintings, several thousand drawings, and approximately 1,200 photographs.
Gabriele Münter's works
Jawlensky und Werefkin, 1908/1909Kandinsky und Erma Bossi am Tisch, 1912
Sinnende, 1917
Woman in Thought II, 1928
Dame im Sessel, schreibend (Stenographie. Schweizerin in Pyjama), 1929
The Blue Lake, 1934
