Only those who are perceived exist. In contrast to their male colleagues, female artists tended to be neglected or ignored in art media and art history until the 1990s. With three retrospectives, the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg is giving female artists more attention this year.
The exhibition “Gabriele Münter. images of people”. The show, jointly developed by the Bucerius Forum, the Münter Foundation and the Munich Lenbachhaus, is dedicated to the 250 portraits in Münter’s work for the first time.
Around 100 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and reverse glass paintings from the period 1899/1900 to 1940 are on display. They come from the Murnauer Foundation, the Lenbachhaus and the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Museum Ludwig Cologne, the Israel Museum and private collections.
Actually, Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) is no longer unknown. Recently, her works have even experienced an enormous price hike. Her still life “Madonna”, for example, achieved 1,125,000 euros at an auction at Ketterer in June 2021.
However, Münter’s liaison with Wassily Kandinsky limited her artistic visibility and reception for many decades. Kathrin Baumstark, curator of the exhibition at Alter Wall, is therefore ignoring the creative influence of her famous life partner. The forum director believes that knowledge of Münter’s biography has contributed less to understanding her art than to overshadowed it.
The current show is intended to help “give Gabriele Münter her rightful place in art history: not as Kandinsky’s wife, muse or pupil, not as the keeper, patron or patron of the Blue Rider – but as the important artist of the 20th century, who she was.”
Art lovers associate Gabriele Münter primarily with deserted landscapes from Murnau, farmhouses and flowers. Even as a child, the native Berliner liked to portray people with a pencil and photographed them early on on a trip to the US. At her artistic debut in 1907 at the Paris Salon d’Automne, the artist mainly exhibited portraits. “Painting portraits” was considered “the boldest and most difficult, the most spiritual, the most extreme task for the artist”.
Münter’s most colorful, most expressive pictures were created during her time as a founding member of the “Blauer Reiter”. In 1909 she painted the sweeping likeness of her Russian colleague Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej Jawlensky’s companion, as a self-confident beauty with a wide flower hat. Paul Klee, who lived a few houses next to her and Kandinsky on Munich’s Ainmillerstraße, also became an icon as the “man in the armchair”.
In exile in Scandinavia, Münter made ends meet with commissioned portraits. After her return in 1920 she continued to paint people, especially children. She depicted the “Sleeping Girl” from 1934 shown in Hamburg in a cool and distanced manner without touching accessories, elegantly linking surface, color fields and lines, arms, hands and head outlined in black in the style of reverse glass painting. No less expressive were the talented draftsman’s minimalist views of the modern “New Woman” in her sketchbooks.
The exhibition course, which Münter’s human images each with early photographs in the six chapters “Self-portraits”, “Portraits”, “Children”, “Groups”, “Figures” and “Drawings”, allows their artistic and visual development to be followed successively. Her use of colour, surfaces, lines and abstraction resulted in a versatile pictorial language reminiscent of the Fauves, Henri Matisse, but also Otto Dix and Félix Vallotton. Last but not least, her tireless love of experimentation formed Gabriele Münter into an original, independent artist who deserved all the visibility from the start.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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