Gabriele Münter valuation
Painted Murnau in heavy outline and flat colour, then hid the Blaue Reiter in her cellar for the duration.
Gabriele Münter was born in Berlin in 1877 and, barred as a woman from the Munich academy, enrolled at the Phalanx school, where Kandinsky taught her and then lived with her for more than a decade.
What a work by Gabriele Münter is worth
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Bio
Gabriele Münter was born in Berlin in 1877 and, barred as a woman from the Munich academy, enrolled at the Phalanx school, where Kandinsky taught her and then lived with her for more than a decade. In 1909 she bought the house at Murnau in the Bavarian foothills that gave the circle its base, and there arrived at the manner she is known for: heavy dark contours, flat unmodulated colour, and a debt to the Bavarian folk tradition of painting on the back of glass. She was a founding member of the Blaue Reiter. The war separated her from Kandinsky permanently. Through the Nazi years she kept a large cache of the group's work hidden at Murnau, and on her eightieth birthday in 1957 gave it to the city of Munich, which is why the Lenbachhaus holds what it holds. She died in 1962.
Oils on board from the Murnau years are the centre of the market — landscapes, interiors and portraits of the circle — with drawings, reverse glass paintings and a small graphic output in woodcut and linocut alongside them. The Gabriele Münter und Johannes Eichner Stiftung in Munich holds the archive and is the authority on attribution, and works that left the estate unsigned carry its stamp. Board supports warp and split with humidity, the paint is applied thinly, and discoloured old varnish over these flat colours is disfiguring.
At a glance
- Born
- 19 February 1877, Berlin
- Died
- 19 May 1962, Murnau am Staffelsee
- Movement
- Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
America, the Phalanx and the first Blaue Reiter show
After both her parents had died, Münter went to the United States with her sister in 1898 to visit family, photographing the journey with a new camera. Back in Munich she took Maximilian Dasio's beginners' classes at the Women's Academy in 1901 before the Phalanx School, since the academies in Munich and Düsseldorf were closed to women.
She and Kandinsky travelled through the Netherlands, Italy, France and North Africa, meeting Henri Rousseau and Matisse. In 1911 she, Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded the Blaue Reiter, and she showed six paintings in its first exhibition. She also made a significant body of woodcuts and linocuts.
Sèvres, the war and the later work
Kandinsky taught Münter to paint with a palette knife, and her early Phalanx pictures keep to yellows, greens and browns. The Murnau landscapes that followed use blue, green, yellow and pink inside strong contours, often with red for emphasis. In 1906 and 1907 the couple lived at Sèvres outside Paris and both showed at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne. In Munich they helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung, and she showed fourteen paintings in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition.
When war broke out in 1914 they went to Switzerland, and Kandinsky went back to Russia without her. His marriage to Nina Andreevskaya in 1917 ended the relationship, and for some years she painted little. She returned to Germany with Johannes Eichner and was painting again by the late 1920s, including portraits in the spare, clear manner of the Neue Sachlichkeit. The gift she made to the Lenbachhaus on her eightieth birthday ran to more than 80 oil paintings and 330 drawings, and Munich awarded her its Culture Prize in 1956.
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