YOU may barely have heard of her, except maybe as the lover of Wassily Kandinsky. But where, it is worth wondering, would Kandinsky have been without her? Where would the bold Blaue Reiter group experiments have ended up?
On one level at least, the importance of Gabriele Münter is undeniable. She played a huge role in the history of early German modernism for it was she who, despite political risk and financial privation, preserved hundreds of so-called “degenerate” paintings throughout the Nazi period, sneaking them out of Munich and hiding them in her rural retreat. Without Münter, most of the history of a pioneering modern art movement would probably have been lost. But is there more to her?
With Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906-1917 the Courtauld Institute offers the British public a first opportunity to find out. A concise introductory show of her work asks us to see her as more than a custodian or a lover of Kandinsky. It suggests that she played an important artistic role in her own right.
She is certainly held in high regard in her homeland. She has become far more famous than another female Expressionist, Marianne von Werefkin, for instance, who was more accomplished at applying intellect to tea-party conversation than paint to a canvas. Visit Münter’s “Russian villa” in the Bavarian market town of Murnau, now inseparably associated with the Blaue Reiter group, and you will find that she has become the tourist board’s covergirl.
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Born in Berlin in 1877, Münter came into a modest inheritance by the time she was 20. She made the most of her freedom, travelling to America before returning to Germany to attend a series of art schools at a time when women were barred from public art academies.
In 1901 she enrolled in the progressive Phalanx school founded by Kandinsky who, ten years older than her and married, had recently arrived in Munich from Moscow. The next summer she accepted his invitation to join his painting class in the foothills of the Alps. A photograph shows the perhaps somewhat unlikely party posing amid mountain scenery, complete with long skirts and parasols, high-buttoned collars and bicycles.
Kandinsky was a notoriously impetuous teacher. If he didn’t like a colour a pupil was using, apparently, he would pull it out of their paintbox and hurl it away. But he appealed to the headstrong Münter. This was the trip that sparked off a relationship of which her later partner, Johannes Eichner, would say: “If it were possible to delve deep enough into the facts, a gripping novel would be born.”
After several years in which Kandinsky and Münter pursued an unsettled, itinerant life together, the couple alighted upon Murnau in 1908. Enchanted, they returned the following year with Alexei Jawlensky and Werefkin to spend several months in the house Münter had bought.
There, living a simple life entirely in the spirit of the avant-garde, Münter tended the garden and furnished the house with her own paintings, with religious folk art and local handicraft. And it was there, she said, that “the great leap took place. It was like an awakening for me. I felt as though I were a bird in song.”
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The Courtauld show focuses mainly on the few ensuing, intensively creative years in which, working alongside and in close discussion with her lover, Münter helped to lay down the foundations of the Blaue Reiter movement.
She was already accomplished as a painter, as a couple of early Impressionist-influenced works in this show reveal. But from 1908 she was experimenting restlessly; testing, adopting and discarding ideas. “When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters,” she said. “I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim.”
Rapidly she leaves the last vestiges of naturalism behind her. Putting down the palette knife, she picks up a brush, sometimes completing, it is said, as many as five pictures a day. Her simple forms and heavy outlines, her unmixed colours, forceful contrasts and flattened perspectives, speak of the bold intensity of her gaze. Sometimes her paintings sing with her high spirits, gleaming gem-bright against the startling yellow backdrop (apparently she decorated her house in this colour). Other, darker, paintings have a lowering intensity, a mood of sadness, even aggression.
“It is impossible to teach you anything,” Kandinsky had told her when she first enrolled as his pupil. “You can only do what has grown inside you. Nature has given you everything you have.”
Intuitive spontaneity and freshness of response were certainly Expressionist credentials. And yet, despite her avid interest in folk art and her search to recover some sense of almost medieval authenticity, Münter is more than some gifted primitive.
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The 21 (mostly small) paintings here are carefully selected to illustrate the range of her influences, to reveal how she referred to her own experience as a designer of woodcuts, for instance, or developed the post-Impressionist technique of cloisonnisme (framing forms with dark outlines), derived from Paul Gauguin and taught to her by Jawlensky, or learnt from the Bavarian craft of glass painting.
She was not an untrained naive but a self-aware artist. Her portraits are more than a precious record of the now famous group that gathered in Murnau. Their emotional impact arises from Expressionist principles. And these, too, are applied to her genre scenes and still-lifes. She imbues the most humble object with an almost spiritual dimension, the dimension her lover sought in his move to the abstract.
Only two later paintings are included in this show. Both are portraits done in 1917, when she was living in Stockholm after her separation from Kandinsky. They are melancholy pictures, haunted by a mood of introspection.
Münter could not, as her lover did, move both artistically and emotionally on to a radically new world. Her painting dwindled slowly and she retreated increasingly into a life of isolation. She rarely returned to her easel, even after the Second World War, when art historians increasingly courted her. Her great moment as an artist was over.
Leave this show and wander through the re-hung gallery of the Courtauld where the works of the Blaue Reiter group have been gathered and you will see how strongly she could hold her own in this context. But move on to a room of Kandinsky paintings and it seems evident that she was not the pioneer but the pupil.
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The pictures which the Courtauld now presents are gathered like memories of her great moment. From them it is evident that she is more than some mere scrapbook-keeper of her avant-garde group. Her experience as she captured it in painting is her souvenir.
IT TAKES TWO TO MAKE ART
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