Back to the beginning
Andrew Lambirth on the Courtauld’s superb exhibition of work by Gabriele Münter
In this country we’re not familiar with Gabriele Münter (1877–1962). Some may know her as the lover of Kandinsky, but few know her art at all well — for the simple reason that it has been little shown here. In her native Germany, she is justly celebrated, for Münter was a pioneer Expressionist and a member of the Blaue Reiter group. Yet there has never been a museum exhibition of her work in Britain. This is now remedied by the superb small-scale show Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906–1917 — at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House (until 11 September), which borrows heavily from the famous Lenbachhaus collection in Munich. Of the 21 paintings on view, 18 are from this source — all the more appropriate since Münter herself donated her unrivalled collection (including many works by Kandinsky, Marc, Macke and their colleagues, as well as her own pictures) to this museum on her 80th birthday. For the first time in London, we are able to see just how good a painter she is.
The attic room which houses the Münter show can be approached through two rooms hung with work by her contemporaries: a whole gallery dedicated to Kandinsky, with some stunning early paintings and later abstracts for useful comparison, and a gallery of mixed works, including a lovely Léger, ‘Contrasts of Forms’, Heckel’s ‘Egyptian Girl’ and Soutine’s ‘Young Woman in a White Blouse’, for context. The Münter gallery itself is rich with colour. Expressionism heralded a departure from the naturalism of Impressionism, a renewed focus on the inner rather than the external world, seeking out the spiritual and emotional response. Expressionist painting was characterised by intense colouring, formal simplicity (in terms of shapes and pictorial space) and powerfully expressive brushstrokes. Compare an early Münter of 1906 ‘Avenue in the Park St-Cloud’, the first exhibit here, with any of the later works. This picture is built up in carefully graded touches of colour applied with a palette knife in an Impressionist style taught to Münter by Kandinsky, with whom she was then living in Sèvres. (They had met in 1902 at the Phalanx School in Munich, where Kandinsky was teaching, and began to spend time together. Their relationship became intimate the following year.) It’s a confident and skilful piece, but belongs in another world to the daring simplifications and bold colour areas of her Expressionist work.
Within a couple of years the change had been made — the stylistic leap that was to transform modernism. Of course, Münter was not alone in her researches. Besides the close relationship with Kandinsky, there were artistic friendships which nourished her, particularly with the Russian artists Marianne Werefkin and Alexej Jawlensky. (Through the latter, for instance, Münter was to absorb the influence of Gauguin and Matisse.) Crucial to the developments in her way of seeing was the discovery with Kandinsky of the Bavarian market town of Murnau, on the edge of one of the largest stretches of moorland in Europe. In this relatively isolated spot they found a rural timelessness and harmony which encouraged a return to the primitive beginnings of art. Inspired by folk art, and in particular the traditional Bavarian and Bohemian methods of reverse glass painting, and the carving and firing of local figurines, Münter pursued a radical course of simplification.
Look at the vibrant ‘Street in Murnau’ of 1908, with its ardent colours and fluid, vigorous brushwork. Perspectival space is largely flattened to stress the primacy of the picture plane, which is now an interlocking arrangement of flat coloured shapes. In this painting the black outlines which characterise her style, and make it resemble cloisonné work, are less in evidence, being overborne by passages of excited colour. There is a rawness to this picture, a feeling of liberation, as colour is no longer restricted to accurate representation but allowed a more expressive and emotional role. There is also a joyousness which is beguiling: wonder at a new world revealed. The ‘cloisonné’ style is more evident in the solid colours and simple forms of the double portrait ‘Jawlensky and Werefkin’ of 1909. Actually it can hardly be called a portrait since both sitters are depicted as featureless, their faces pinkish, rough, half-ovals. It’s a bright and jewel-like composition, set in a meadow in Murnau (that year Münter bought a house in the town), and captured in luminous colour. The witty portrait of Jawlensky entitled ‘Listening’, of the same year, depicts the artist in a state of popeyed astonishment (not to say puzzlement) as he listens to Kandinsky expounding his latest theories on art. It’s a caricature, but a remarkable painting as well, in its incorporation of abstraction (in the way the oil lamp is made up of stacked flat shapes) and decoration. ‘Still-Life with Chair’ (1909) takes the idea of the vertical buildup of forms (already seen in the oil lamp) yet further, with potted plants rising against a chair back. It’s an unusual subject to choose, but did it suggest a desire to ‘spiritualise material reality’, as fellow painter Franz Marc claimed? A strange and beautiful picture, it certainly deserves to be better known.
Another odd painting is the later ‘Black Mask with Pink’ (1912), a much more obviously decorative set-up, seemingly devoid of religious or folk art overtones, and even sinister in its collapsed space and hint of carnival misadventure. Along with the marvellous ‘Chaff Wagons’ (note the dark bulk of the traditional wagons contrasted with the zippy white lines of the ultra-modern telegraph wires across the top of the painting), and ‘Village Street in Winter’, with its vivid palette, line of washing like broken teeth, and pleasingly organic jumble of semi-geometrical roofs, these are among the finest modern paintings on short-term view in London. Kandinsky left Münter in 1916, after 15 years together, and she never saw him again.
She spent some years in Sweden and Denmark, not always painting, before eventually returning to settle in her house in Murnau. Undoubtedly her most interesting work was produced in the decade to which this splendid exhibition is devoted. Gabriele Münter has been shamefully neglected; the Courtauld now gives us the chance to change all that.
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