Gabrielle Münter

Gabriele Munter was born in 1877 in Berlin; her father died when she was nine and her mother when she was twenty.  She began her art studies in 1897 at Dusseldorf in the Ladies Art School because women students were not then admitted to the established art academies.  From 1898 to 1901, she traveled in the United States, then resumed her studies in Germany in 1901.  She soon became dissatisfied with traditional teaching and enrolled as one of the first students at Kandinsky's Phalanx School.

From the time of their meeting, Kandinsky was impressed by her talent, declaring that he had nothing to teach her, that she was a "natural" artist.  The two traveled across Europe from 1903 to 1908, including a two year stay in France.  They lived at Sevres, near Paris, where they were much impressed by the new style of bold color and simple forms evolving there in the work of the Fauves group.  During those years, 1906 and 1907, Munter exhibited her work in Paris at both the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne.

On their return to Germany, Munter and Kandinsky settled near Munich in the village of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps.  Her painting, as well as that of the other founders of the Blaue Reiter group in 1911, Kandinsky, Von Werefkin, Klee, Marc and Jawlensky, is characterized by broad, flat areas of color, intense and expressive color contrasts; emphatic, bold and simple designs and extreme expressionistic effects.

Kandinsky, though married, pressed Munter for a romance and 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.  He stopped writing to her from Russia, ignoring her efforts to contact him, and she learned secondhand of his marriage.  She suffered from the whole thing bitterly.

Munter left Murnau in 1917 and returned a decade later; by the 1930s she was once more painting actively.  She had to do so clandestinely during the Nazi era, as her work, along with most other progressive German modern art, was declared "degenerate" under the Third Reich.  In 1931 Munter moved back into the Murnau house with Johannes Eichner, a physician, and she preserved the house almost exactly as she and Kandinsky had left it.  After World War II she worked to promote the reputation and history of the Blaue Reiter group during its early years in Munich. She died in 1962.