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Gabriele Munter: Espoused to Art - German Expressionist painter
Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Sue Taylor
Gabriele Munter's lively experiments in painting helped establish the Expressionist style--sometimes despite her conflicted "mentor" relationship, with Wassily Kandinsky--at a time when women had virtually no access to artistic training.
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In the often anxious realm of German Expressionism, a world of virility, domination and apocalyptic visions, Gabriele Munter stands alone.[1] One of a very few, remarkable women associated with the movement, she helped establish a style but made no theoretical or metaphysical claims for it, going unpretentiously about her business as an artist, painting still lifes, portraits and landscapes with bold shapes and glowing colors. Her vibrant experiments are currently the focus of a retrospective curated by Expressionist scholar Reinhold Heller, whose substantial research has produced a catalogue that is now the definitive source for Munter studies in English.[2] With loans from German, Austrian and American collections, the exhibition includes 82 paintings, prints and drawings from Munter's early maturity--the Expressionist years coinciding with her artistic and romantic partnership with Wassily Kandinsky. Munter lived to regret that relationship passionately, and it is impossible to consider her work without reference to its impact on her art and life.
She apprenticed herself to the future pioneer of abstraction in 1902, when she enrolled at age 26 in his evening life-drawing class at the Phalanx School, which he had just opened in Munich. "There and then I had a new artistic experience," she is often quoted as saying, "how--unlike other teachers--Kandinsky explained things in detail, clearly, and treated me as though I were a consciously striving person who can set herself problems and goals. That was something new for me and it impressed me."[3] Her astonishment at being taken seriously, with all due respect to Kandinsky's pedagogical skills, is poignant testimony both to the inadequacy of her earlier training (barred from the art academies on account of her sex, Munter resorted to lessons from private tutors and ladies' art associations) and to the then prevailing contempt for women artists. In the exhibition catalogue, Heller describes the misogynist forces that worked to discourage women's artistic aspirations, citing, for example, the art critic Karl Scheffler in 1908:
Since woman cannot be original, she can only attach herself to men's art. She is the imitatrix par excellence, the empathizer who sentimentalizes and disguises manly art forms. In Goethe's words, she "is not capable of a single idea" and "takes the knowledge and experience of man as ready-made and adorns herself with it." She is the born dilettante.[4]
Widely read art magazines such as Jugend and Simplicissimus likewise ridiculed women artists, and in this context Munter's persistence seems additionally impressive. Finding a sympathetic mentor in Kandinsky, she pinned her hopes on him. Eleven years her senior, he may well have been a parental surrogate--Munter's father had died when she was nine, her mother when she was 20. The ensuing saga is well known: within a short time, Kandinsky, though married, pressed his student for a romance; by the summer of 1903, they were secretly engaged, pending his divorce. Fourteen years later, Munter was still waiting for him to fulfill his commitment when he abandoned her to marry another woman. As revealed in Heller's biographical chronology, a veritable page-turner incorporating heartfelt letters and diary entries, Kandinsky did not conduct himself nobly in this affair. He even neglected to tell her when it was over. After the war, he stopped writing to her from Russia, ignoring her efforts to contact him, and she learned secondhand of his marriage to Nina von Andreevskaya. His behavior was duplicitous, confused at best, and Munter suffered from it bitterly.
During the time they were together, Munter assisted at the founding of the New Artists' Association and the Blue Rider, traveled extensively with Kandinsky, and bought a country retreat for the two of them in. Murnau, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. It was here, in the stimulating company of their artist friends Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, that Munter truly hit her stride as a painter. "I took a major leap," she wrote, "from painting after nature, more or less impressionistically, to the feeling of a content to abstracting to the presentation of an extract."[5] Jawlensky in particular seems to have served as a catalyst; he had assimilated the principles of French Synthetism, and one sees them transmitted to Munter in works like her Girl with Doll (1908-09), where broad planes of bright color, often thinned to near translucency, are outlined in black, producing an effect akin to stained glass or cloisonne enamel. In Murnau, too, Munter began to collect and emulate the folk art of Hinterglasmalerei, or reverse-glass painting, and Kandinsky followed her lead, adopting the technique in his own work and reproducing a number of 19th-century examples in the Blue Rider Almanac.[6]
