As I said in my previous essay, the thing about Gabriele Münter’s pictures is they reach out and grab my eye.
I think her fundamental achievement is that she uses an equipoise in her elements of composition to enable a looker to enter into the moment that the visual composition points. Also, given that Woman invisibility means that in casting around for an explanation of “woman art”, reflections on the intimate personal are never far off - the note to Petit-déjeuner des oiseaux, (just above), painted in 1934 and lightly retouched in 1938, noting its near-mystical draw and contemplative quality, references Münter’s concerns at turning 60.
I would like to make a stab at my own analysis of a Münter painting.
Münter’s expressionistic or lyric project implies to me that, unlike most of her peers, rather than playing on the looker’s visual experience, revealing it, she would have concerned herself with sharing experience of the moment.
Sharing experience has consequences for how a looker should evaluate Münter’s oeuvre.
With Picasso or Kandinsky or Macke or Kokoschka (and many others of course), a looker has a dialogue about intention and visualization with the painter: How do we get here?
Since the looker shares the experience of the moment with Münter, there can be, is, no dialogue. The questions are plural: “Where am I? How do I feel about this? What is the sense of it?” Maybe, after all, the moment makes for a communion: the looker and painter slip their arms around each other, talk about feelings over tea, but later.
A looker contemplates a Münter painting.
This implies that evaluation of one of her pieces must consider how the different elements contribute to the equipoise that opens on the experience.
To put it in lyric poetry terms: Munter’s composition of visual elements works something like the wonderful confounding of sounds, rhythms, topos and senses in The Windhover:
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion. …
(The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lines 11-14)
I am thinking here especially of the composition of Intérieur à Murnau (ca. 1910), a visual description, if one is to believe her title, Munter’s apartment at the lake town of Murnau, south of Munich.
Münter seems to me to put visual and psycho-social perception in non-jarring contrast. She does this in order to draw a looker’s attention to the fact that the sense of things seen is not the things seen but the psychic space that exists a little to the side of how the eye arranges things in their different potential visual arrangements.
Eye grabbed, Intérieur à Murnau’s center seems to be a corner composed of, front, right, a six-paned French window overlooking a (garden?) with, to the left, a fireplace, and, along the interior wall, a two-piece buffet with bibelots and split blue curtains on a rod. Instead of doors.
I am then almost taken aback to notice, at a 45-degree angle across three-quarters of the whole wide-plank floor, a long, multicolor walk-along rag rug whose right hand corner is in strict line alignment to the extreme right edge of the windows and which almost floats up to the foot of the fireplace. And all this does nothing to diminish, right, front, the visual importance of: two Cross-of-Lorraine (air ducts?), a squarish white (larder?), a dry sink (?) a narrow- and a wide-neck pitcher along with an early 20th century (cast iron?) household convenience (?), now-unintelligible, along with a mat…
In a separate room and seen through an entryway bordering the buffet, a man, lying in bed, right forearm cradling his head, apparently reading…
The analysis featuring in the note to Intérieur explains this, for me, very complex composition, as a domestic scene. Basically, around Münter’s personal life. The man in the bedroom is likely Münter’s boyfriend of the time, Wassily Kandinsky. I can tell because he’s handsome and, though it’s early, “reading” in bed, just as I would were I Gabriele’s own Swee’pea.
But it seems to me this personal-story-telling-as-analysis is misleading. It excludes Münter’s painterly goal of portraying a moment and then sharing the experience with the looker. When I’ve taken in Intérieur, it’s pretty clear that the main thing of it has to be more abstract than that: in this moment, there can be, is, a man, in the bedroom. Whether reading or preparing for something more intimate or not, whether called Uwe Müller or Herwarth Walden or Wassily Kandinsky, or not, for a’ that, he’s a man in the bedroom, part of a moment, like the walk-along rug, the buffet or the dry sink or those bizarre cross-of Lorraine (air vents, gas holders?), essential to what is seen but necessarily accessory.
Where I come from the place where a body lives is called “a house”. Intérieur gives me material for a lyric. Her “house” calls up my first rooms at college. They make me think of a water bed my older brother had in his rooms at college and Lucy, his warm and friendly girlfriend. Then I think of two songs that represent two common moments of “house”: a lovey-dovey Our House; a gritty tale, House of the Rising Sun. And then, come to think of it, the visual and psychological center of Intérieur à Murnau is those two lights (stars) shining through the bottom row of panes in the French windows: from (the neighbors across the garden? Further off?).
However I think Münter’s work ought to be understood, whatever "moment" I get "to share" with her, whatever sense I can make of that shared moment in my life, the point is that this exhibition lets me do it. It’ll let you do the same. That’s an achievement.
________
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
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.
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 (above). Reanimation runs until 13 July 2025.
Finally, 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.
