Gabriele Münter’s sweet expressionism

Paris. The retrospective devoted by the Museum of Modern Art to Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) highlights the work of an artist long relegated-except in Germany, his native country-to the simple role of partner of Vassily Kandinsky. After Paula MODERSOHN-BECKER (1876-1907), the museum invites the public to discover another essential female figure of expressionism, in the broad sense of the term.

The route, organized in chronologically, opens with a surprise: although known as a painter, Münter begins by apprehending the world through the lens of his camera. Equipped with a Kodak Bull’s-Eye, it multiplies clichés during a long stay in the United States. These photographs reveal not only its sense of framing, but also its curiosity for all the strata of American society, including the black community. Other photos, taken in 1905 during a trip to Tunisia, belong to a part still unknown to his work, studied in detail in the catalog by Katharina Sykora and Dominique Jarrassé. Several small paintings made soon after, as Rue de la Verdure in Bab el-Khadra, Tunis (1905), inspire it directly.

Primitivism, popular arts

Gabriele Münter works in Munich, a city where artistic and avant-garde tradition coexist. After two years spent in an academy – a rare institution accepting women at the time -, she joined the Phalanx school, oriented towards modernity and directed by Kandinsky. She then became the partner of the Russian artist, a relationship that will last until the First World War. At its beginnings, Münter explores wood engraving and painted in a style influenced by impressionism, especially during the couple’s stay in Sèvres (Garden gate in Sèvres1906). She then begins to be recognized as an artist: her paintings are accepted at the Salon des Independents, her engravings at the Fall of Automn.

But it was in Monnau, a village located in Haute-Bavaria south of Munich where she acquired a house with Kandinsky, that her style asserts. A new period opens: every summer, the couple is joined by Alexej von Jawlensky and his partner Marianne Von Werefkin, also a painter. Without forming a group in the strict sense, their common work turns out to be decisive.

Interesting fact: it is more the influence of Jawlensky than that of Kandinsky who marks the work of Münter. Both share a fascination for the human figure. “I particularly liked to submit my work to Jawlensky […],, He explained a lot to me; He made me take advantage of what he had experienced and acquired, and spoke of “synthesis”, writes Münter. Surprisingly, the names of Jawlensky and Werefkin are barely mentioned in the exhibition. Everything suggests that, with a concern to counterbalance the shadow of Kandinsky, the commissioners Isabelle Jansen and Hélène Leroy chose to minimize other influences.

Gradually, Münter abandons the impressionist touch for more synthetic compositions. The forms, simplified and with thick black contours inherited from partitionism, exalt a sometimes bright color, but most often deaf and finely nuanced, as in Ms. Mathilde with a blue shawl (1908-1909). The stay in Murnau offers him a new source of inspiration, linked to popular arts: glass painting. The village was one of the homes of this technique. Münter regularly indulges in it, and this practice clearly influences her style: like the stained glass, she simplifies forms and figures – often holy representations – which she presents from the front, as well as in Listening (portrait of Jawlensky),, 1909.

At this stage, one wonders if Münter is part of the expressionist current. Undoubtedly, if we consider that it was one of the co -founders of Der Blaue Reiter (the blue rider), this emblematic group formed in Munich in 1911. Like its members, it shares a pronounced taste for children’s drawings, popular arts and primitivism. However, it develops a form of expressionism distinct from that, more vehement and protest, of the artists of Die Brücke. By simplifying, one could say that Der Blaue Reiter embodies a less violent and more heterogeneous version of expressionism.

This singular position undoubtedly explains the evolution of his style, in particular from the 1920s. His stay in Berlin and his meeting with the new objectivity gave birth to more sober works – often drawings – which the exhibition brings together in a section entitled “New figuration” (Woman sitting in cigarettes1925-1930). The route ends on the peaceful landscapes of Murnau, where Münter, this nomadic artist, settled definitively from 1931.