GABRIELE MÜNTER 1877-1962

CONTOUR, COLOUR, LIGHT: SHOWING THE ESSENTIAL

The exhibition Contour, Colour, Light: Showing the Essential – Gabriele Münter 1877–1962 marks the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation’s celebration of one of the most influential female artists of German expressionism. The retrospective brings together around fifty paintings from the different phases of Münter’s working life, from her tentative early attempts at a late-impressionist style to her later, in part abstract works. The crowning glory of the exhibition are Münter’s bold, colourful paintings from her time in the Blauer Reiter group. These are displayed alongside around thirty pieces of her rich collection of sketches and graphic artwork. The collection is further enriched by the inclusion of works by her pre-1914 contemporaries, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and Franz Marc, as well as Adolf Erbslöh and Alexander Kanoldt. The exhibition aims to illustrate where the essential quality of Münter’s art resides: she used sharp contours and delicately composed swathes of pure colour, free from internal structure or perspective, to strip back and concentrate the motif. This marked Münter’s attempt to come closer to what she herself termed ‘feeling out the content’ or ‘giving an extract’.

Even as a child, Gabriele Münter displayed an exceptional gift for drawing. She found the academic art programmes in Düsseldorf and Munich outdated, until she enrolled in the Phalanx School of Art, which counted Kandinsky among its teachers. She soon became his pupil and lover. Following a secret engagement in 1903, the couple spent many years travelling. In the summer of 1908, Münter and Kandinsky worked together with Jawlensky and Werefkin in Murnau and developed a groundbreaking, new, expressive style of painting. In 1909, Münter became a founding member of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, and went on to join the Blauer Reiter group two years later. The group’s vibrant painting style, which tended towards abstraction, was the source of both admiration and outrage. The outbreak of the First World War put a premature end to the promising development of Münter and her friends.

Kandinsky fled to Russia and in 1915, Münter herself emigrated to Sweden, where she quickly made a name for herself. When Münter returned to Germany in 1920, it took years for her artistic development to get back on track. The rise of National Socialism brought increasing restrictions. Münter retreated to Murnau for the duration of the war, where she lived with her new partner, Johannes Eichner. It was only in 1949, when the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter opened in Munich, that the group surged in popularity again – interest that has been sustained to this day. Recent years have seen Münter’s work in particular come to the fore. It has been praised for its significance and placed on par with work by her colleagues and friends. A catalogue of her paintings is currently in production. When published, it will shed further light on the artist’s significance.

The first major exhibition dedicated to Münter’s work took place in Hanover in 1951, where her art was showcased at the Kestnergesellschaft alongside pieces by Paula Modersohn-Becker. The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation’s 2008 exhibition Gabriele Münter: The Kandinsky Years – Pictures and Photographs used the same space to show Münter in her lesser-known role as a photographer. The present retrospective, conceived by Dr. Christian Torner, the curator of the ahlers collection, celebrates the foundation’s twentieth year. The Gabriele Münter anniversary exhibition is also a homage to the industrialist Jan Ahlers, who passed away suddenly in late 2013 and whose many decades of commitment shaped the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation.   

The exhibition features pieces from the ahlers collection complemented by important works on loan from museums and private collections all over Germany and abroad. The catalogue contains texts by experts including Dr. Isabelle Jansen (head of the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich) and Dr. Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy (director of the Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See).