Gabriele Münter’s Groundbreaking Modernist Vision Is Coming into Focus

In 1898, the then-21-year-old German artist Gabriele Münter set off across the Atlantic with a No. 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak box camera. After arriving in the United States, she snapped photos of small-town life across the American South and Midwest. Her travels yielded sharp black-and-white photographs—images of rural porches, groups of young girls, and everyday life in turn-of-the-century America.

Münter is best known for her vivid paintings of domestic interiors and Bavarian landscapes, works that are characterized by bold contours and emotional use of color. Yet her early photographs, taken nearly a decade before her signature style took shape, already show the same sensitivity and subject matter that would later arise in her paintings. “The photography is really something that sharpens her worldview, sharpens her way of looking,” Megan Fontanella, curator of a new show of Münter’s work at the Guggenheim Museum, told Artsy.

Those photographs—never exhibited in Münter’s lifetime—have now returned to the United States more than a century after they were taken. They anchor “Contours of a World,” the German modernist’s first solo exhibition in New York. On view through April 26, 2026, the show features 19 early photographs alongside roughly 60 paintings.

For decades, Münter’s achievements were eclipsed by the men around her, including her romantic partner Wassily Kandinsky. “Contours of a World” asserts that her work was as radical—and as foundational—as that of any of her peers in German Expressionism and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) movement. Many of her male peers approach modernism through myth and abstraction, but Münter applied the same formal innovations to ordinary interiors and portraits, predominantly of women. Her work expanded what counted as a serious modern subject.

Born in 1877, Münter dreamed of being an artist from childhood. As a teenager, she studied with painter Ernst Bosch and German lithographer Willy Spatz. Her 1898 trip to the United States was to visit family in Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas following the death of her mother. Münter, accompanied by her sister, spent nearly two years traveling and documenting everyday life through the lens of her Kodak.

These photographs revealed both a keen eye for composition and an empathetic gaze. One of the most striking, Three Women in Sunday Dress (1900), depicts three Black women in luminous white dresses. The image is inflected with dignity, portraying the women as elegant and poised, even when confronted with the leering gazes of white bystanders.

Another photograph, Three young women bathing in a river, Moorefield, Arkansas (1900), demonstrates Münter’s sensitivity to depth and framing. Her camera is positioned low amid the brush, which frames the landscape, creating a sense of distance and separation from the group of swimmers beyond. This approach is evident in later paintings, where carefully constructed foregrounds frame lush distant landscapes.

“I always say that folks will look at her, her life dates and see, ‘born Berlin, died Murnau,’ and think of her as a quintessential German modernist artist,” Fontanella said. “But she has this more cosmopolitan, expansive worldview, and so much of the groundwork is laid in this U.S. trip at the turn of the century.”

Upon her return to Germany, Münter studied in Munich at the art school of the Phalanx, an experimental association of which Kandinsky was a founder. The two quickly developed a professional and romantic partnership, traveling across Europe and spending an extended period in Paris between 1906 and 1907.

During their time in Paris, Münter encountered the color theories of Henri Matisse and the flattened compositions of the Nabis. These influences filtered into her own style, which crystallized when she and Kandinsky settled in Murnau am Staffelsee, Germany, in 1908. The alpine village’s bright houses and rolling hills appeared in her paintings as bold, geometric forms rendered in saturated color. From the Griesbräu Window (Vom Griesbräu Fenster) (1908), for instance, presents a colossal mountainscape of jagged triangles towering above vibrant rooftops tinted with corals and maroons.

In 1911, Münter and Kandinsky, along with Franz Marc and August Macke, co-founded Der Blaue Reiter, a loose collective dedicated to exploring color’s expressive and spiritual potential. Münter hosted many of the group’s meetings in her Murnau home, which became an informal center for the movement. Münter’s innovation lay in translating the avant-garde abstraction into the realm of everyday life, using splashy colors and compressed space to make provincial scenes pulse.

While Kandinsky and many others around Münter pursued total abstraction, she remained tethered to the physical world. Her skills as a colorist matched any of her peers. Sunset over Staffelsee (ca. 1910), for instance, renders the horizon with an incandescent color palette, where yellows and reds clash with blues and greens. This turns a simple view into a potent expression of awe, where nature mirrors the artist’s inner intensity.

When World War I erupted in 1914, Münter left Germany for Scandinavia, while Kandinsky returned to Russia. She spent the next six years in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway—a period of forced exile that produced some of her most introspective work.

Münter’s palette sharpened; she painted quiet interiors, emotive portraits, and spare winter landscapes. The expressive color of her earlier canvases remained but was tempered by a new stillness and precision. Future (Woman in Stockholm) (Zukunft [Dame in Stockholm]) (1917) captures this shift: A solitary woman is framed against a window, beyond which the city is rendered in clear planes of color.

“I extract the most expressive aspects of reality and depict them simply, to the point, with no frills…[T]he forms gather in outlines, the colors become fields, and contours—images—of the world emerge,” the artist once said, according to Fontanella, who borrowed the title of the Guggenheim exhibition from the quote.

Münter returned to Murnau in the late 1920s, living quietly and continuing to paint until her death in 1962. During this time, she retained her connections with the Der Blaue Reiter artists, protecting much of their work at her Murnau residence during the Nazi campaign against “degenerate” art.

Late in life, Münter was celebrated with major exhibitions in Munich and Berlin, though her role in shaping Der Blaue Reiter—and, by extension, European modernism—remained underrecognized abroad. Only in recent years has her work begun to receive the full attention it deserves internationally, most recently through her solo exhibition at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.