Madrid,
Until two years ago, in 2022, the first complete retrospective on Gabriele Münter did not take place, who contributed to the founding of Der Blaue Reiter, was one of the most representative voices of German Expressionism and achieved no less success during his lifetime. It was presented by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, in a montage that highlighted the versatility and independence of his works: paintings, engravings, drawings and also photographs.
Born in Berlin in 1877, she trained at the Malschule für Damen, the drawing school for women in Düsseldorf, and later at the Phalanx school, where she would have Kandinsky as a teacher. His career spanned more than six decades in which he developed a very diverse body of work and created his own pictorial language, facing many obstacles: even in the advanced circle in which The Blue Rider was born (for which, in addition, he played a relevant editorial production) women artists were excluded from theoretical discussions as they were considered to lack the intellectual and creative abilities of their male colleagues. And his relative oblivion after his death in the sixties, and after learning of a certain claim after World War II, would have to do with the absence or brief treatment of Münter’s production in manuals where the contributions of Kandinsky and Franz are basically addressed. Marc as references of that current, the painting of this German author not being explored beyond her time as a student of the former, with whom she would also be a partner.
Until February, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which has the largest collection of Gabriele’s works outside of German-speaking countries (four works, three of them belonging to the baroness’s collection), is hosting a second curated anthology of his, along with Isabelle Jansen and Mattias Mühling, by Marta Ruiz del Arbol, who was already in charge of the exhibitions in this same center of other avant-garde artists, such as Sonia Delaunay or Georgia O’Keeffe. Organized in collaboration with the author’s foundation and Johannes Eichner and with the Lenbachhaus of Munich, the main providers, it allows us to discover a painter who, compared to the oscillation between the pastoral and the apocalyptic of other expressionists, gave her creations a certain lyricism, which would inspire him, according to Guillermo Solana, the close motifs and figures he portrayed: the houses of Murnau, his closest friends, the places where his personal intimacy took place.
These themes have a lot to do with his predilection for small and medium-sized formats, which do not imply, in any case, a lesser intellectual ambition: Münter’s searches had to do with spirituality and what was pure and essential about his environment. , hence he used basic colors and simplified contours.
In the approach of this exhibition at the Thyssen, which will later travel – with some modifications – to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, we wanted to delve deeper into the importance of photography in the German learning, because by establishing comparisons between some of In the snapshots he took and his paintings we will sometimes find similar frames; and open the chronology addressed to, practically, all of his productive years, since it has been common for reviews of his production to end after World War I, that is, to limit themselves to his time with Kandinsky and The Blue Horseman. Curiously, it was in 1970, six years after Münter’s death and not being too well known, when Baron Thyssen acquired one of her compositions from this artist, and dated 1924, not in her most analyzed period with that group: we we refer to Murnau (Murnau in May).
It is known that Münter did not travel to Spain; He did reside in Paris, for a long time and on two occasions: in the periods corresponding to 1906-1907 and 1929-1930. The French version of this anthology will emphasize those stays, while the Spanish exhibition focuses as a novelty on the time in which he worked in Scandinavia, little examined but interesting (and in which, as far as we know, he did not get to know his contemporary Hilma af Klint).
Articulated with chronological and thematic criteria, the tour presents 150 works including drawings, photographs, paintings and popular art objects or children’s creations that will help us understand his sources of influence, as well as documentation that proves the critical fortune he enjoyed in life of this author who, in her words, sought extract the most expressive aspects of reality and represent them with simplicity, getting to the point, without frills.
A first section of the sample, called Reflections and shadows and conceived as an introduction, it collects some of the self-portraits that Münter created throughout his career, but especially in his expressionist phase (1908-1914), along with photographs, some taken by Kandinsky. In several we glimpse his shadow in the image, a resource to include his figure in the compositions that he would indirectly repeat in paintings such as the magnificent Birds breakfast either boat ridein which he appears from behind in the foreground.
More photographs await us in a second section, Beginnings in black and white: In them he gave an account of his travels through the United States between 1898 and 1900. He went to that place because his parents, German emigrants who would return to their country as a result of the American Civil War, had met and married there. It was during that journey when he received a Kodak camera as a gift with which he began to experiment while also drawing: he took up to four hundred photos of which twenty can be seen in Madrid; He captured natural and urban landscapes, work scenes and interiors, subjects that would also focus his paintings later. But the influence of these images on his later work goes further: he maintained his desire to capture moments, to work in series and a way of looking that was both simple and analytical, which allowed him to articulate his spaces from a few lines.
At the beginning of the 20th century, upon her return to Germany, she began her training: as is known, she met Kandinsky and his imprint had a lot to do with her opting for painting instead of sculpture, the discipline that had most influenced her. stuck at the beginning. The third chapter of this retrospective, Outdoorsremembers how he joined the pictorial campaigns that the author of Of the spiritual in art organized in the fields of Bavaria; There he would develop his first oil paintings and the two of them would continue those trips, a few years later, in Europe and North Africa. As we said, they settled for a time in Paris, where they contemplated the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse and Münter’s interest in both photography and outdoor creation was accentuated, often in pairs and in the same places. scenarios. We can associate these compositions with late impressionism in their reflection of atmospheres and volumes.
After returning to her country again, in 1908, she would settle in the Alpine town of Murnau, a magnet for artists and writers (they say that the filmmaker wanted to take his last name from her, although it is not proven). Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin would form a well-matched quartet that worked and argued together; In those years, our painter made the transition from her short, pasted brushstrokes in Africa and Paris to fluidity, a gradual abandonment of anecdotes and the liberation of color. The artist’s relationship with Murnau would be marked by abandonments and returns.
The Thyssen exhibition dedicates a specific chapter to his portraits, for Múnter the most daring, spiritual and extreme genre, into which he soon entered through his notes and photographs, especially focusing on children and women, the latter both rural and sophisticated, like Von Werefkin herself. When she wanted to she stayed attached to reality, other times comedy prevailed, as in her funny image of Jawlensky listening (by Kandinsky). At first, he gave these works neutral backgrounds, then he introduced the figures into genre scenes.
In the years before World War I, his newly acquired house in Murnau focused much of his work, allowing himself to be guided by a certain utopian perspective of a rural life where he could live and create simply alongside nature. There she discovered the German tradition of painting on glass, which had some features that she cultivated (bright colors, simplified shapes, dark contours). Several of these pieces decorated his own home and would appear in his still lifes, with a devotional sense; She herself even wanted to learn how to work with glass.
This retrospective could not help but review Münter’s contributions to Der Blaue Reiter, in whose almanac and exhibitions he participated very actively after becoming involved in the New Munich Artists Association. At that time, like his companions, he sought for his art to respond to interior and individual needs, hence each one allowed himself to be carried away by a different style, although they shared some of their sources, such as traditional German woodcut. In Gabriele’s case, others were children’s drawings and popular culture, valid for undertaking a process of unlearning that she considered necessary.
The outbreak of the Great War would lead this author to settle, between 1915 and 1920, in Stockholm, given that Sweden remained neutral. It was well received in the local scene and the decorativeism cultivated by the Swedish expressionists was noticeable in some of its pieces, with softer tones and a more graphic style. The landscapes he created there and in Norway normally incorporate small figures, and therefore narrativity, and in those years he also made portraits, some commissioned, others symbolic, attentive to the moods of his models, usually female.
When he returned to his country in 1920, nothing would be the same: his circle of friends had dissolved, Kandinsky had gone to Russia during the war. The lack of a fixed address initially led him to turn to drawing until, in 1925, he settled in Berlin. His style at this time is close, as expected, to the New Objectivity: the brushstrokes do not leave a pasty mark and the colors are reduced. However, he did not incorporate into his works the social denunciation typical of several artists of that current.
After several months in Paris at the end of his twenties, he decided to move permanently to Murnau and that last return in his career would be accompanied, in his work, by a return to old landscapes, expressionist tendencies and even fragments of previous pieces that he reused. It would be on his 80th birthday, in 1957, when Münter donated to the Lenbachhaus canvases of himself and other members of The Blue Rider that he hid during Nazism; That center is now the reference place to go to study them.
“Gabriele Münter. “The great expressionist painter”
THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA NATIONAL MUSEUM
Paseo del Prado, 8
Madrid
From November 12, 2024 to February 9, 2025
