Gabriele Münter

1877 - 1962 • German • Painter • Expressionist

"[Kandinsky] explained things in depth and looked at me as if I was a human being, consciously striving, as being capable of setting tasks and goals." - Gabriele Münter

Munter was one of KANDINSKY's first students, and he described her as a "natural" artist, saying there was nothing he could teach her. "What I can do for you is merely to guard your talent, to nurse it, and to make sure that nothing false touches it," he told her. Her work was included in the inaugural BLAUE REITER exhibition in Munich She was one of the group's foundersand she and Kandinsky, who left his wife, lived and traveled together for many years, until he left her, too, for another woman in 1917. Munter used intense, bright colors and simplified shapes, typical of and perhaps inspired by the FOLK ART in a Bavarian village where she and Kandinsky had settled. Staffelsee in Autumn (1923) is a landscape in brilliant reds, orange, green, and blue. While her shapes are simplified, and she abandoned perspective for flattened spaces, she did not abandon representational art, as Kandinsky did. During the Nazi era, Munter worked clandestinely, for her art was condemned as DEGENERATE ART.