Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), German painter known for the intense color and emotional charge of her landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and interior scenes. She played an important role in the development of expressionism, a painting movement that used distortion and exaggeration to convey emotion. She also was a member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of expressionist painters founded in Munich, Germany, in 1911 by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and German painter Franz Marc.

Münter’s brilliantly colored paintings were strongly influenced by Bavarian folk art, especially the tradition of hinterglasmalerei (painting on the back of glass). Münter painted simplified and flattened forms, with dark outlines like the leading in stained glass. She also sought to capture the naive quality of children’s art, as can be seen in Peasant Woman of Murnau with Children (1909-1910, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich). In her use of color as an expressive tool rather than a means of objective description, Münter resembles French painters associated with the fauvism movement, whose work she saw during trips to Paris from 1904 to 1906. Other painters of Der Blaue Reiter had also absorbed many of these influences, and the group served as an important vehicle for the exhibition and promotion of Münter’s and other members’ work.

Münter was born to an upper middle class family in Berlin. Because women were not permitted to study at the established art academies, she first enrolled at the Ladies Art School in Düsseldorf and later at the Women Artists’ Association in Munich. In 1902 she began attending a progressive artists’ association in Munich known as Phalanx, where Kandinsky was her teacher. This was the beginning of a long personal relationship with Kandinsky, with whom she shared a house from 1908 until 1917. During her early career Münter enjoyed great success, showing in Paris, France, at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907, and holding one-person shows all over Europe before World War I (1914-1919). In the 1930s a traveling retrospective of her work in Germany was labeled “degenerate art” by German dictator Adolf Hitler, forcing Münter to paint in secrecy at night. Interest in her work later revived and the Municipal Museum in Murnau, where she lived from 1908 until her death, honored her with a retrospective exhibition on her 80th birthday.