Gabriele Münter: Not Just “the Lady Painter of the Dozen”

Over a period of more than six decades, Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) created a broad and multifaceted oeuvre. With unbridled curiosity, she continued to try new techniques and forms of representation, which would cause her work to shine even without the aura of the ‘Blue Rider’.

Olga von Hartmann. About 1910
Oil on canvas. 60.3 × 45 cm. Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
© 2021, ProLitteris, Zürich

The famous Blue Rider: the relationship between Gabriele Münter’s work and this short but all the more mystifying episode of art history is ambivalent.

On the one hand, her participation in the group around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc is generally underestimated. Everyone knows the names of the two editors, but what is less well known is that Münter significantly supported the Almanac with her work. However, you will not find her name in the imprint. Münter and Maria Marc, the wife of Franz Marc, were always present at the editorial meetings. “Marc and Kandinsky each with his Amazon,”[1] Elisabeth Macke, wife of the painter August Macke, would say mockingly about the presence of the partners at the meetings. They had a say in the choice of pictures and authors, performed valuable editorial work and dealt with the extensive correspondence. “The Blue Cavalry is charging forward. [...] Join the storm so that the goal may be reached,”[2] Münter wrote to Arnold Schonberg a few weeks before the publication of the almanac to remind him to send in his contribution. “I imagine that nobody thought I had a say ... except for Kandinsky. Everyone saw me as the lady painter of the dozen,”[3] Münter would sum up her role years later.

Kandinsky. 1906
Colour linocut on Japanese paper. 24.4 × 17.7 cm
The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and the Kunstbau, Munich, Gift of Gabriele Münter 1957
© 2021, ProLitteris, Zürich

On the other hand, the Blue Rider and her long-time partner Kandinsky are given a status in her biographies and contributions on her work that overshadows her extensive oeuvre. Her independence and unconventional nature - both personal and artistic - is largely hidden.

Münter’s courage in asserting her efforts against prevailing social norms and her constant curiosity that pushed her to learn new things and challenge herself are remarkable. The Münter family granted her freedoms that were by no means a matter of course for a single woman at the end of the 19th century. Swimming brought her great joy and she called a bicycle her greatest treasure. These sports activities were not exactly considered fitting for a lady. What is more, she was also attracted to drawing. At the age of 20, Münter finally went to DQs- seldorf on her own to take drawing lessons at a private drawing school for women. At that time, the doors of the academies were still closed to ambitious women artists.

The death of her mother would interrupt this endeavour. The following year, Münter decided to accompany her sister Emmy on a trip to visit relatives in the USA. Together they embarked upon a two-year journey through various North American states from New York to Texas, with stops along the way in Missouri and Arkansas. Münter’s sketchbook, in which she kept portraits of her far-flung relatives, was always by her side. Her eyes were constantly wandering in search of an interesting subject. In 1899, her relatives gave her a Kodak Bull’s Eye No2 camera. About 400 photographs of this journey testify to her ability to quickly master the technique and capture her surroundings in pictures with a trained eye. The selected image sections are often reminiscent of the compositions of her later paintings, just as the photographs of groups of people and individuals radiate precisely the intimacy of many of her painted, drawn or woodcut portraits.

“I’d been so used to drawing since childhood that later, when I came to painting, I had the impression that it was innate within me, whereas I first had to learn how to paint,”[4] Münter would say in retrospect about five decades later. She did indeed learn to paint.

After her return from America, Münter went to Munich and entered the Phalanx painting school. Her teacher was Wassily Kandinsky and they became close. The painting classes would often go on trips in the Munich area and paint outdoors, and soon Münter was able to show considerable success in her painting. The trips with her married lover that would follow also offered ample opportunity to try out plein-air painting. Münter and Kandinsky travelled to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Tunis. Münter quickly gained confidence in mastering colour. The colour application of her early paintings is impasto style in keeping with the late-Impressionist style. The artist herself also seemed content and, in the spring of 1907, she exhibited six of her works for the first time in the Salon des Indépendants.

After years of wandering, Münter finally bought a house in Murnau in the Munich area. Here, she lived and worked with Kandinsky. The artists maintained close contacts with the Munich art scene. Meetings were held in Murnau, among others, those of the Blue Rider. The restless search by the artists for new forms of expression beyond the academic was to pave the way for Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism and much more. The Blue Riders with Münter, Kandinsky and their friends Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej Jawlensky, Maria and Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee and others at the forefront, caused a sensation. The fruitful art theoretical discourses and the stimulating artistic exchange among friends helped Münter to liberate her style of painting. The brightly coloured pictures from the years between 1908 and 1914 continue to determine how her versatile work is perceived today. Despite her proximity to Kandinsky, who was moving along the paths of abstraction, Münter unwaveringly followed her own compass. “Anyone who looks carefully at my paintings will find the graphic artist in them,” said Münter, describing her working method. “Despite the bright colours, there is a solid graphic framework. I usually draw my pictures with a black brush on the cardboard or canvas before I paint. They are usually based on a small pencil sketch that I drew under the impression of the motif.”[5]

However, the beneficial symbiosis was to end abruptly with the outbreak of the First World War. Only a few days after Germany declared war, many protagonists of the avant-garde left the country. Their nationality was to make them enemies from one day to the next. In addition to von Werefkin and Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Münter also fled to nearby Switzerland at the beginning of August. From here, Kandinsky travelled on to Russia without Münter with the promise of seeing each other again
soon in a neutral country. Münter left for Stockholm. There, she quicky settled. She learnt Swedish and made contacts with the Scandinavian art scene. She also had many opportunities for exhibitions. Her career was beginning to take off. However, her private life was more difficult. After Kandinsky pushed his travel plans further and further back, he did not come to Stockholm until the end of 1915. He stayed until March 1916, never coming back to her again afterwards. The last postcard from June 1917 ends with the words: “I kiss your hands, your Kandinsky.”[6] Then, the letters ceased without explanation. It was only years later that Münter found out that Kandinsky had remarried just a few months after they last met and had fathered a son.

Unaware of this, Münter moved back home after years abroad. However, her return was difficult. Germany had changed since the war. Some friends had left the country, while others had fallen. “When I returned, I felt a stranger and unable to assert myself again. During my life wandering around hostels, I did little painting, [...].”[7] Münter’s resignation is understandable given the situation she faced. The war had removed the basis for a flourishing cultural life. If people previously had fought together for a cause, now everyone was fighting for themselves, for a crumb of the cake that had shrunk, and of which female artists often got nothing. “[...] and that I was one of the pioneers of new art is long forgotten. Those who stood with and behind me are now all celebrities, I was pushed aside [...],”[8] Münter wrote about her bad situation in 1922.

She searched for her lost sense of community by repeatedly staying at Schloss Elmau, a spa hotel at the foot of the Wetterstein Ridge in Upper Bavaria. For Münter, the spa was “an island against time”. Here, she was able to relax from her restless and lonely nomadic life between Cologne, Munich, Murnau and Berlin. In addition, a long-standing legal dispute with Kandinsky over his pre- 1914 items and works that he had left behind in Germany sapped her strength. Kandinsky had returned to Germany with his new wife in 1920 to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar.

In 1926, the case was finally settled. Münter was required to hand over to Kandinsky 26 boxes of his belongings and about a dozen paintings. The remainder officially became her property. This ruling was to compensate Münter at least materially for the injustice inflicted on her and allowed her to draw a line. In Berlin in the 1920s, Münter was to find support after 1925 in a circle of modern women - artists, writers, journalists. She would also regularly attend painting courses with Arthur Segal and made new attempts at painting after years of almost exclusively drawing. As at the beginning of her career, she had her finger on the pulse of the times. It is for this reason that her stylistic forays into New Objectivity painting were not too surprising. She painted a self-absorbed work entitled “Lady in the Armchair.” The soft, flowing material of the clothing is underlined by the fine painting with a thin, pale-toned application of paint. The delicate work is certainly attractive, but Münter herself harshly judged the pictures from this period as “kitsch”.

At the end of October 1929, a small inheritance allowed Münter to leave for Paris. After years of seeking and searching, she would find her way back to her earlier artistic ease and creativity. The motifs literally leaped out at her. During the day, she filled her sketchbooks in the Parisian cafes, streets and parks; in the evening, she painted the impressions in bright colours with quick and firm brushstrokes. Münter was not to return to Germany until October 1930. She was finally prepared to face the ghosts of her past in the Murnau house and settle there for good.

Münter had already met Johannes Eichner, an art historian and philosopher, on New Year’s Eve 1927. Cautious bonds of friendship were forged in letters and mutual visits which would go on to bind them together for the rest of their lives. Eichner supported Münter and organised an exhibition tour commencing in 1933 in the Paula Mod- ersohn-Becker House in Bremen. It would continue to be shown in numerous art clubs and exhibition venues in Germany until June 1935. In view of the political events of the year - Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power - and the ideological and material destruction of Modernism that began soon afterwards, the question remains as to how such a large exhibition tour of one of the most important figures of German Expressionism could still take place under these conditions. An exhibition planned for May 1934 by the Munich New Artists’ Association, of which Münter had been a founding member in 1909, had already been cancelled for ideological reasons.

The reason why Münter was still able to exhibit may partly have been due to Eichner’s “marketing”. Münter herself only commented on her work in three published texts, and only later in her life in 1948 and 1952. Thus, Eichner’s descriptions at this time were the only tangible material available as a “reading aid” for Münter’s pictures. Eichner portrays Münter as a naive painter and places her work in the folklore area, that is, the borrowing of stylistic means of reverse glass paintings collected by her are interpreted as being folkloric. The reviewers used such keywords only too gratefully. According to the “Deutsches Volksblatt” in words of National Socialist blood rhetoric: “[...] the Swabian blood from the mother’s side, and the Westphalian blood from the father’s side in her veins. The Swabian as a richer, more pensive element softens the harder, more angular Westphalian nature of her blood. Both, however, bind her to the people and to that which is popular, rather than as a matter of taste, but as a necessity from an inner instinct. So, her painting is genuine and folksy in the best sense of the word.”9 Nevertheless, there were wild scenes in Jena and accusations from the far right of “primitivism,” which Hitler condemned in his Nuremberg speech on art. As a former comrade-in-arms of Modernism, Münter was treading on thin ice. This may even be the reason why Münter’s works from the 1930s were to become increasingly naturalistic again. The fact that none of her paintings were shown in the “degenerate art” exhibition was probably mainly due to the fact that none of her paintings had previously been in the collection of a public museum, from whose holdings the exhibition was fed.

Münter had concealed hundreds of works by these “degenerate” artists in the basement of her house in Murnau during the Second World War years. On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 1957, she donated more than 1,000 works by artists from the Blue Rider and its circle to the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus.

The large Blue Rider exhibition of 1949 strove to rehabilitate artists who have been ostracised for years. Münter’s work has also been repeatedly exhibited together with the Blue Rider and solo, yet she has long been denied the recognition she deserves. Her work is often reduced to the Blue Rider years. The fact that Münter continued to work tirelessly for five decades after the publication of the almanac is often ignored. In the context of the Blue Rider, on the other hand, she is - wrongly - overshadowed by her male colleagues Marc and Kandinsky.

The exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee aims to change all that. It was created in close cooperation with the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. This first retrospective in Switzerland shows the versatile work of a special artist and aims to correct the patriarchal canon of art history.

As the last survivor of a legendary era, Münter died at the age of 85. Her extensive artistic and written estate, as well as the Murnau house, are still maintained in the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich, and keep the memory of one of the last pioneers of Modernism alive.

1. Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke, Remembering August Macke [Erinnerung an August Macke]. Stuttgart 1962, p. 187.
2. Letter by Gabriele Münter to Arnold Schonberg, September 27, 1911.
3. Gabriele Münter in her diary, October 27, 1926, in Kleine, Gisela: Gabriele Münter und Wassily Kandinsky, Frankfurt a. M., 1990, p. 406.
4. Gabriele Münter, “Confessions and Memories" [“Bekenntnisse und Erinnerungen“] in Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub (ed.), Gabriele Münter: People's Images in Drawings [Gabriele Münter. Menschenbilder in Zeichnungen]. Berlin 1952, p. 23.
5. Ibid, p. 24.
6. Postcard from Wassily Kandinsky to Gabriele Münter, June 12, 1917. Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
7. Gabriele Münter, “Gabriele Münter about Herself“ [“Gabriele Münter uber sich selbst“] in Artwork: a Monthly Magazine for Visual Arts [Das Kunstwerk. Eine Monatsschrift uber alle Gebiete der Bildenden Kunst]. Vol. 2, No. 7 (1948), p. 25.
8. Letter by Gabriele Münter to Dr. Julius Siegel, October 1, 1922 (?)
9. Gabriele Münter, “Galerie Valentin,” in Deutsches Volksblatt, No. 2 (April 13, 1935).