After years of being known merely as the woman alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter has recently received the recognition as one of the leading artists of the early 20th century and is being honoured with grand retrospectives. Together with Kandinsky's painting class she travelled to Kochel, where she produced her first works in a natural outdoor environment. It was there that the relationship between teacher and student intensified for the first time. In the following years of their partnership they undertook many trips, among others to Tunis (winter 1904/05), Rapallo (winter 1905/06) and to Sèvres near Paris (1907). Inspired by the Paris School, Münter refines her painting technique —moving towards an impasto, spatula application of paint.
While exploring the countryside around Munich in 1908, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky came across the small town of Murnau, where later that summer they resided for a few weeks together with their colleagues Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. She herself writes in retrospect: "The first time I studied there, in the late summer of 1908, I was full of images of the place and the location and put them down on 41 × 33 cm cardboard. More and more I grasped the clarity and simplicity of this world."
****Gabriele Münter's Rote Wolke mit Haus, produced on cardboard in the same dimensions as mentioned above, impressively illustrates how intensive the stays in the village of Murnau impacted her artistic style. In times of intense creative energy, the couple inspired each other, working with broad, two-dimensional and rapid brushstrokes and a colourful palette. The mighty cloud above the house dynamises the otherwise tranquil landscape and, in its force of colour, clashes with the dense green of the surrounding countryside. The turn towards expressionism and the elevation of its contents onto an interpretive level are evident at this point. One recognises the ground behind the house and, looking at the work, quickly realises how confident and bold Münter's pace of work must have been at that time.
As it is not uncommon for Gabriele Münter, this scene exists in finely nuanced form in more than one version. The artist must have been fascinated by the natural phenomenon of this radiantly coloured cloud.
A more subtle and less expressively painted version of this cloud with a house can be found in the collection of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art in Notre Dame, Indiana. It is painted in oil on an unusually large canvas considering the artist's style at the time.
It seems that our colourful, expressive cardboard served as inspiration for a motivic interpretation and elaboration in Münter's work. On the threshold of a new, very individual style, the painting's radiance proves to be an extraordinary testimony to Gabriele Münter's artistic independence.
Press release courtesy Galerie Utermann.
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