“À l’écoute (Portrait de Jawlensky)” (1909),
Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025
The thing about Gabriele Münter’s pictures is they reach out and grab my eye. And her expressionism is to her time’s Expressionism what Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry is to lyric poetry at the turn of the century. Also, her pictures are definitely hers. I have to read them as if they were.
I know Münter’s pictures grab my eye because, when I can, I usually try to avoid getting my eye grabbed by pictures at exhibitions. What I do is sidle up like a disheveled crack dealer approaching a nerved-up sex worker. That’s to say, come on the picture indirectly, suddenly. The trick usually gives me the opportunity to grok the picture before the art in it captures me but it didn’t work with Münter, early or later work. I actually experimented in getting around her eye-grab but couldn’t.
I say the pictures are “definitely hers” because even after my first encounter with her art as likely being a possible unique contribution to esthetic evolution in our times at the Sturm-Frauen show in Frankfurt – 10 years ago ! – the talk around and about Münter has always seemed to put that potentiality in doubt: “Good painter, that Gabriele Münter, but the unique contribution belongs to Kandinsky”. The underlying dismissal is there even when the “Münter was K’s girlfriend, you know” has been censored out and her work is featured. The association has been questioned but the work of clearly identifying her achievement as hers has a way to go.
“Trois femmes en habit du dimanche, Marshall, Texas”
(1900), Gabriele Münter. Photo © Adagp, Paris, 2025
The exhibition Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours at Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris, with a thoughtful selection of 150 of Münter’s works as evolved over 60 years of a life dedicated to visual art gave me the visual meat and the mental space to imagine for myself the painter’s particular creative achievement. The exhibition follows on efforts over the last 10 years to present modern-era woman artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Anna-Eva Bergman. This one is the best yet.
It seems to me that were it not for Woman invisibility, Münter’s artistic significance would have long since gone without saying just on the evidence of what she was involved in as a professional painter. Determined from her teenage years to make art her profession, at the turn of the 20th century, Münter was out and observing and extensively photographing the “burgeoning” USA and “exotic” Arab North Africa. When the visual arts world was starting to embrace new tools, Münter, too, was experimenting with techniques such as the lithography that develops, for instance, into the distinctive poster art of the entre-les-deux-guerres and into groundbreaking work by people such as Alexander Calder and M.C. Escher.
“Aurélie” (1906), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris
Although forbidden by law to attend art school, thanks to inherited money and determination, Münter was there and alive with fellow-artists in the dawn of the post-Impressionism, when artists were thinking about creativity and art and beauty and the individual. She was interested in the roots of human creativity: took a strong interest in “child art” and popular or folk art.
Münter became a founder of Der Blaue Reiter group, was a colleague and friend of many of the period’s other defining creative personalities, including the remarkable art and literary promoter Herwarth Walden and the painter, professor and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky – in whom she recognized, as many others did, an excellent teacher and, as others would also, also, found a rather agreeable “bad-boy” boyfriend in him.
Münter was, literally, an attending midwife at the birth of European Expressionism. She presented for the first time at the Paris Salon des indépendants in 1907. Along with writers such as Alfred Döblin, Anatole France and Knut Hamsen, she contributed words to Walden’s Der Sturm, the reference literary and art journal from 1910-1932. With painting peers such as Franz Marc, Kandinsky, Kokoschka and August Macke, she had solo in Walden’s gallery. Münter also, apparently, kept a written trace of her thinking about life, art, her work and the work of peers, throughout her life.
“Nature morte au saint Georges,” (1911), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025
Targeted as a “degenerate artist”, Münter preserved the art of her peers, including her former boyfriend’s, during the Hitler time, at considerable risk to herself.
Her career may be enough to make her significant in early 20th century painting, but her particular way of painting is what makes her significant as an artist. As I wrote earlier in this essay, Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours gave me the space to make a stab at it.
I’ve said Münter’s pictures “grab my eye”.
While most painters have a predilection for one or another element in their composition, broadly, for line, color or texture as well as their approach to the “ghost image” (the way people tend to construct visual images: think, “upside down” map or “Where’s Waldo?”, Münter does not seem to. For instance, it seems to me that in a composition, Picasso tends to stress his line a little bit more than his color or texture. Line seems his privileged way of giving a looker a lot of ways of looking at an image – it’s this particularity that makes a body point and say, “That’s a Picasso”! Both August Macke or Wassily Kandinsky, tend to privilege color because, I think, that’s where they locate visual beauty or interest. Franz Marc loves texture or, I should say, textured color, because he seems to like the movement in things.
“Enfant endormi (vert sur noir)” (1934), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025
Münter can, as Enfant endormi (just above) shows, stress her line, just like Picasso.
“Rue du village en hiver” (1911), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris
And she can texture color like Franz Marc, too, as Rue de village en hiver (above) shows.
“Le Lac bleu” (1954), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris
And she does color, too – look at Le Lac bleu (just above).
In fact, Münter’s mastery of color is often praised to the skies. But, from this exhibition, at least, I just can’t find that Münter consistently privileges color, line or texture to consistently achieve a particular visual effect, as do, I think, Picasso, Macke, Kandinsky or Marc or any other of the many other painters of her time and afterward who sought an individual or “original” vision.
I think, in fact, the praise of Münter’s colors is wrong-headed. It leads us to believe that Münter’s artistic take on “expression” was more similar to her peers than it actually is.
First, color is an inherently unreliable telltale in general and in particular in painting – usually, when I discuss it, I discuss an artist’s theory of it approach to it, arrangement of it, not color itself. And then photography, the medium where most people meet painting, systematically transforms color, these days most often toward highly saturated over-brightness. Second, Woman invisibility is likely at work in an over-association of Münter and color. Kandinsky, her boyfriend during her twenties, was of course big on color. Since it’s well known that birds of a feather flock together, especially when one of the birds is a girlfriend, Gabriele must have been as besotted with color as she was with her Wassily. No?
“Autoportrait” (1909-1910), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025
The lack of visual evidence for a defining predilection in the elements of composition is why I am now thinking that Münter’s creative effort was psychological or perceptual, not visual.
Münter, it seems to me, was aiming to give the looker her full sense of the thing looked at, not to demonstrate a technique or state a belief. Indeed, Wikipedia, quoting the painter’s notebooks as worked up by the art historian Reinhold Heller, has her writing essentially what I’m suggesting:
“My pictures are all moments of life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously…”.
Ironically, this clear declaration of esthetic aim is embedded in an explanation of why she’s so grateful to Kandinsky for teaching her to use a palette knife “with assurance”. The palette knife let her paint faster which let her stay closer to the moment she was painting.
With her declared intention as validation, it’s safe to say, from the immediate evidence of the exhibition, that when Münter was composing, she was trying to compose “expressively”, as the thoughtful poets of the time were trying to do, and with the same aim – capture life, not a “slice of life” but the anima or movement in a moment of life.
“Paysage avec cabane au couchant” (1908). Photo
© Adagp, Paris
The (self-) expressive, individualized, “lyric” poetry getting born in the period, such as that of Rainier Maria Rilke (1875-1926), is said, in any case, to be at the origin of the notion of “expressionism” in painting in Germany and in the rest of Europe. In English-language terms, I am thinking of Rilke as I think of Robert Bridges’ slow-leak of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “expressionistic” or “lyric” compositions of finely balanced sense, sound and rhythm into the early 20th century. Lyrics such as The Windhover (published 1918) or Binsey Poplars (written 1879?), conjure the experienceof the apprehension of “God’s presence”, the anima or flow, in the world.
I'm kidding on the square; just a bit, but there is something of the sublime Emily Dickinson in Münter's own sense of her regard.
In her search to create a visual analog to expressive or lyric poetizing, Münter would have put her greatest effort into the equipoise of line, color and texture around the anima and the sense of it in the moment. It would be, through this compositional equipoise, I think, through this very firm control over composition that “grabs my eye”.
________
I saw Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours at Musée de l’art moderne de Paris on 3 April 2025. It is part of a summer program that includes three other exhibitions. Peindre sans detours runs until 24 August 2025.
Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices; Matisse et Marguerite, Le regard d'un père; Philippe Perrot brought into the permanent collection
“Untitled” (2005), Philippe Perrot. Photo © Aurélie Dupuis/Azentis Technology
The museum has inducted works by Philippe Perrot (born in Paris 1967, lived and worked in the Paris suburbs, died in Paris 2015) into its permanent collection. Of Perrot’s works, I wrote in my notebook “like contemplating static”. Perrot makes cartoon geometries in a narrative style recalling for me a Shadok-like-, but grittier, alternative comic-book-, telling of the intriguing half of an untold, perhaps, bizarre hidden story. It had me gritting my teeth. But agreeably. Really agreeably. Perrot’s work shows that static is worth some contemplation – especially around his use of mediatized popular art forms? Perrot’s on show until 2 November 2025.
Concept artist Oliver Beer’s interactive child-centered installation Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices turns around, at least for the moment, a fascinating cycle of recopying of Nina Childress’ sublime Sylvie – grosse tête (2018). Reanimation Paintings runs until 13 July 2025.
Matisse et Marguerite, Le regard d'un père, a lovely exhibition, to be sure, with virtual reality installation to go with it, but to be sure, God help me, I was introduced to Matisse by my older brother’s godmother, mater’s best friend, early in the 1960s – the godmother prospered in family and community life, became a federal judge and died, but it seems to me not a day has passed that I haven’t heard something of this Henri Matisse, painter and now père. I feel sure that others will write more and more intelligibly about it than I ever could. Matisse et Marguerite runs until 24 August 2025.
