Gabriele Münter

(Germany, 19/02/1877 - 19/05/1962)

Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (c.1908-09)

Often starting and finishing her paintings in just one sitting, Münter’s prismatic works create new worlds wherein the artist’s subjectivity is manifested in brightly coloured abstract forms. Her kaleidoscopic and flourescent palette, often applied with a palette knife to produce rough textures on an otherwise flat form, bring to life the vivacious character of her subjects while simultaneously revealing the speed and compulsion with which she painted them.

Born in Berlin to an upper-middle-class family, Münter was encouraged in her artistic pursuits and began her formal training in 1902 with sculpture and woodcut techniques at the progressive Phalanx School where she met the school’s director, Wassily Kandinsky. Later, in 1909, she helped establish the avant-garde group Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artists’ Association) which she and Kandinsky left in 1911 to form Der Blaue Reiter and beginning the Expressionist movement.

Through her interest in folk customs, and especially with glass painting, Münter directed Der Blaue Reiter artists towards the aesthetic of brightly coloured, simplified shapes bound by dark outlines that the group’s work is easily identified by. Pushing the Fauve aesthetic to a new level, she was able to synthesize the expressiveness of Fauve colour with formally organised pyramidal forms that allowed early twentieth-century artists to further distance themselves from the Impressionist aesthetics they inherited and closer to pure abstraction. Münter and the aesthetics she brought to the group, therefore, had unparallelled impact on the development of abstraction.

Despite being a founding member and playing a crucial role in launching Expressionism across Europe, and her undeniable effect on shaping the movement’s aesthetic direction, Münter’s work is eclipsed by her male contemporaries and she is most often remembered as the student and lover of a man who was once her teacher, rather than his artistic equal.

Image: Gabriele Münter, Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (c.1908-09). Oil on canvas, 78 x 60.5 cm. Princeton University Art Museum, U.S.A.