Staffelsee in Autumn, Gabriele Münter, 1923, National Museum of Women in the Arts.
I enter the Thyssen Museum in Madrid to see the exhibition about Gabriele Münter. She is one of the great painters of German Expressionism, who has finally been placed on an equal level with her male colleagues. Lately, several museums have organized major exhibitions of her work. Last year it was the Leopold Museum in Vienna, this year, in addition to the Thyssen in Madrid, the Guggenheim in New York will open a major retrospective of the painter in November, which will be called Into Deep Waters.
From the very first paintings I look at, such as Breakfast of the Birds, I am reminded of the house where Gabriele lived with Wassily Kandinsky, in the small town of Murnau that I visited in the winter of last year. Kandinsky was her painting teacher and became her partner.
After traveling together through Europe and North Africa, the couple decided they needed a house where they could paint and lead a stable life. They fell in love with Murnau, a village on the shores of Lake Staffelsee at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. Gabriele bought the yellow house, built in the style of the local chalets, and they lived there from 1908 onwards. They became inseparable friends of Russian painters Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky (also a couple) possessed as they all were by the excitement of portraying landscapes and human figures in a way that had never been done before.
I look at the many paintings of snowy landscapes on display at the Münter exhibition in Madrid and I remember the whiteness of the snow-covered fields and frozen lakes of Murnau with their faint winter light. On entering the snowy garden of the house-museum, I was struck by the paintings on the furniture and the wooden stairs. In the explanations offered by the house-museum, I read that, on acquiring the house, the couple set to work painting the walls and decorating the furniture. Indeed, the interior of the house, which that day contrasted so much with the quiet, white landscapes, is in itself a work of art: the walls of the rooms are a riot of bright colors – reds, blues, greens – and the wooden stairs, like the rustic furniture, are adorned with paintings of horsemen, trees and flowers.
I move on to another room in the exhibition and stop in front of the painting Boat Trip, with Gabriele rowing with her back to me, Kandinsky standing in the boat and two other people: Marianne Werefkin and Jawlensky’s son. Then I think of all the artists who came to the yellow house; the composer Arnold Schönberg was a regular visitor, as were the painters Macke and Franz Marc, who together with their hosts founded the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) a key group in modern expressionism. All those creators who visited Gabriele and Kandinsky, and whose portraits hang on the walls of the yellow house, gave a new direction to 20th-century art. Some, like Kandinsky and Jawlensky, took their spiritual quest in a new direction: abstract art.
In 1914 the war put an end to the joy and vitality of the group. From one day to the next, Kandinsky, as a Russian citizen, had become an enemy of Germany and after a few months with Gabriele in neutral Switzerland, he returned alone to Russia where he married. Gabriele spent the war years in Stockholm.
During Nazism and the Second World War, the painter had managed to save her paintings, those of Kandinsky and those of other expressionists, labeled by the Nazis as degenerate art, by hiding them in the basement of her house, with the help of her husband, the art historian Johannes Eichner. The Gestapo, which carried out several raids on the house, did not discover the treasure. When Gabriele turned 80 in 1957, she bequeathed her collection to the Städtliche Galerie in Munich. The painter spent the rest of her life in Murnau, where she died in 1962.
