Gabriele Münter’s Love Affair with Photography, Painting, and Kandinsky

The first painting in the Guggenheim’s survey of German Expressionist painter Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) extends hospitality—an apt introduction that sets the tone for the rest of the show as one of welcome. From the Griesbräu Window (1908) depicts a town in the Bavarian Alps, Murnau am Staffelsee, as seen from the window of a brewery-inn on the market square. Murnau was in the midst of a beautification project, adding colorful facades to its buildings in order to attract tourists, and the idea of color as invitation resonates here and across Münter’s oeuvre. Pink brushstrokes link the foreground rooftops to distant mountains, beckoning the viewer to linger over a landscape that the artist associated with feelings of liberation and an unlocking of her creative potential.

Münter was in Murnau with her then-partner (and former teacher), Wassily Kandinsky, who also painted the view. Together, the two developed a boldly expressive style, codified in 1911 with the formation of Der Blaue Reiter, a loose association of painters working in and around Munich. Yet while much of Expressionism can feel outwardly explosive, Münter offers particularly intimate views. This is not to say that she couldn’t partake in the action: her exuberant Dragon Fight (1913), based on the myth of Saint George slaying the dragon, proves she very much could. Often read as an allegory of the new guard artists in Der Blaue Reiter fighting against the old order, the painting is most of all a study in dynamic color, the green of the landscape in violent contrast with the spreading pool of red blood from the multi-headed dragon’s severed necks.

Still, it’s the quieter views in which Münter really shines. In one almost unbearably intimate look at her domestic life, Living Room in Murnau (Interior), ca. 1910, she recreates an evening at home. A pair of slippers poised on the edge of the canvas offers a tender welcome; personal mementos line the shelves and walls; and in an adjacent room, Kandinsky reclines in bed, a rare glimpse of a canonical artist in repose. Münter’s willingness to expose her life, and herself, to the viewer lends her version of Expressionism something more generous than her consort’s grandiose claims to universal spirituality.

This sense of exposure was formulated early on, even before Münter began painting. She started out as a photographer, working with a No. 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak camera on a trip to the US in 1900. Practicing photography allowed Münter to experiment with cropping and composition in ways that later influenced her painting. A tight view of parcels clutched on a woman’s lap, Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping) (ca. 1909–12), feels especially photographic. But working with the camera also attuned Münter to the ways she might intentionally incorporate herself into her work, as her body steadied the camera and her shadow appeared on the film.

In 1920 Münter learned that Kandinsky, who had returned to Moscow to wait out WWI, had married another woman. But her work, and her spirit of generosity, continued for several decades. Breakfast of the Birds (1934) sets out a visual and gustatory tableau: Münter has arranged tea and cake on a table, as well as birds in the bush outside the window, as much for our pleasure as for that of the seated figure depicted. The Letter (1930) similarly proffers a small plate of grapes at the edge of the canvas, conjuring, in my mind, a perfect antithesis to the threateningly arrayed bunch of grapes in the center foreground of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This is a version of modern art without the outright aggression that so often accompanies it, though Münter was no less seriously engaged with questions of representation including radical innovations in form, composition, and color.

I longed to see Münter’s vibrant colors spiraling up the Guggenheim’s central ramp, as I’ve seen Kandinsky’s several times. But the more secluded rooms in which the show unfolds fit her practice, creating an intimate encounter between viewer and painting. Visiting on a cold November day, I found Snowy Landscape with a Red-Roofed House (1935) especially appealing, with the start of a path placed right at its center. Two figures in the midground, actively shoveling, make space for the viewer to enter Münter’s richly conceived world.