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Gabriele Munter: Espoused to Art - German Expressionist painter
Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Sue Taylor
It is a pity that the exhibition does not include any of Munter's reverse-glass pictures, nor any of the fascinating, careful studies she made after children's drawings, which she and Kandinsky also collected.[7] But a selection of color lino- and woodcuts does show her radically simplifying and distilling imagery while mastering a new medium. She produced the first of these prints, tiny portraits and street scenes, during a sojourn with Kandinsky in Sevres, and exhibited them in Paris before returning to Germany in 1907. Heller discusses them in detail, and just as Peg Weiss identified the critical role of graphic art in Kandinsky's formal development,[8] Heller sees Munter's most progressive stylistic tendencies emerging first in her prints. Several from 1908 depict little girls and their toys, an unsurprising choice of subject given Expressionism's inheritance of the romantic cult of the child, yet Munter's approach seems uniquely affectionate and familial, unlike the prurient interest taken by Brucke artists, for example, in their young models. The blond girl in the tender Sleeping Child is Munter's niece Elfriede Schroeter. In the artist's attention to her, and to her cousin Annemarie Munter, it is tempting to detect a young woman's dream of the daughters she would never have.
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Her situation was complex. Social expectations dictated for Munter a home and a family, but her independent turn of mind, reflected in her decision to become an artist, deflected her from these goals--apparently not without emotional conflict. She desired marriage from Kandinsky, to be sure, but could her choice of such an unavailable mate have been an unconscious strategy for ensuring her autonomy? Subtle patterns in her decidedly nonnarrative, nonsymbolic pictures hint at her ambivalent feelings. In the idyllic retreat she established in Murnau, she could enjoy the periods of blissful domesticity celebrated in paintings like Country Homes (Kandinsky in the Garden), 1912, and Interior (Still Life, Bedroom), 1909. In the latter, Munter presents a pleasant room with cupboards, washstand and, glimpsed through an open doorway, Kandinsky comfortably reading in bed. Oddly, however, the strong welcoming diagonal of a rag rug does not lead to him but veers away from the bedroom altogether and dead-ends in a corner. Pentimenti record the shifting position of the rug on the hardwood floor and betray the artist's own indecision. A favorite compositional device similarly suggests reservations (or regret?) with regard to the tempting security of home, as Munter moved about with Kandinsky from hotels to rented rooms. In images of houses such as Fall Evening--Sevres (1907), Rose Garden (ca. 1907-08), Oberau (1908), The Pink House (Country Home near Murnau), 1908, and House in Winter (1909), she deploys assertive foreground horizontals that bar access to the home. Formally, these fences or low walls serve as effective repoussoir elements; on a symbolic level, they may externalize feelings of frustration, alienation or defense.
