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Gabriele Munter: Espoused to Art - German Expressionist painter
Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Sue Taylor
Munter's most ambitious and memorable painting remains the large-scale (49 1/4-by-28 7/8-inch) multifigure portrait Boating (1910), which depicts a summer outing on the Staffelsee near Murnau. Kandinsky stands handsomely in the stern of the boat, framed against the blue mountain landscape and dominating the seated group, including, with her back to the viewer, Munter at the oars. Werefkin, in her big red hat and powder blue dress, is joined by a black dog, and next to her a child sits primly, with hands folded in his lap. This boy, Andreas Jawlensky, born in 1902, did not belong to Werefkin but to her young Russian maid, Helene Nesnakomoff. In the painting, Munter manages to capture a certain diffidence between Werefkin and the child, whom she accepted as Jawlensky's son but did not warmly embrace. Proud of her platonic love for Jawlensky, four years her junior, Werefkin had given up painting to further his career. She moved to Munich with him and supported him and their household financially until the Russian Revolution halted her income. He left her after the war, marrying Nesnakomoff and finally acknowledging his son, whom he had until then called nephew.[13] Munter and Werefkin thus had in common ultimate betrayal by the men they loved, but the tensions that riddled the respective relationships of these artist-couples are hardly apparent in the lovely Boating, where the triangular mass of figures promises enduring stability and the serene lake is yet unruffled by winds descending from the artist's brooding purple sky.
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[1.] My allusion, of course, is to Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early 20th-Century Vanguard Painting," Artforum, December 1973, pp. 30-39.
[2.] Reinhold Heller, Gabriele Munter: The Years of Expressionism, 1903-1920, New York and Munich, Prestel-Verlag, 1997.
[3.] Gabriele Munter, quoted in Heller, p. 12.
[4]. Karl Scheffler, quoted in Heller, p. 46.
[5.] Munter, quoted in Heller, p. 16.
[6.] See the invaluable documentary edition of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. and trans. Klaus Lankheit, New York, Viking Press, 1974, repr. Da Capo Press, 1989.
[7.] Three oil-on-cardboard copies by Munter of children's crayon drawings of houses are reproduced alongside the delightful originals by Jonathan Fineberg in The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the Modern Artist, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 70-71, figs. 3.45-50.
[8.] "Graphic art in particular, which required above all simplification, reduction, and compression of imagery, afforded [Kandinsky] the necessary bridge between ornamentation and abstraction. It was in graphic art that drastic transformations were first undertaken and here that Kandinsky found his way to abstraction." Peg Weiss, Kandinsky: The Formative Munich Years, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 135.
[9.] Munter, quoted in Heller, pp. 155, 156.
[10.] Heller, p. 122.
[11.] Munter, quoted in Heller, p. 27.
[12.] Anne M. Wagner, quoted in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., "Introduction," Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, London, Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 12. For further discussion of the "Woman Question" and its implications for female artists, see Rosemary Betterton, "Maternal Figures: The Maternal Nude in the Work of Kathe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn Becker," in Griselda Pollock, ed., Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 164.
