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Impressionist & Modern Art
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3219* GABRIELE MÜNTER(Berlin 1877 - 1962 Murnau)
Vereiste Strasse. 1911.
Oil on board.
Estate stamp on the reverse.
34.9 x 40.5 cm.
This work will be included in the Catalogue
raisonné of paintings by Gabriele Münter,
published by the Gabriele Münter and
Johannes Eichner Foundation.
Provenance:
- Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich.
- Private collection, Germany (acquiered in
the 70s from the above gallery).
After the early death of her parents, her
first private drawing classes in Dusseldorf,
and a two-year stay in America, Gabriele
Münter moved to Munich in 1901. As it
was forbidden at that time for women to
study at a public art academy, the young
emancipated woman first entered the
school of the association of female artists
(Künstlerinnen-Verein) and later a private
art school called the “Phalanx”, where Kan-
dinsky was first her teacher and, a short
time later, her lover. Münter and Kandinsky
travelled to many different places and their
painterly style was strongly influenced by
their nascent relationship with the Fauves.
In her journal Münter wrote: “Ich habe da
nach kurzer Zeit der Qual einen großen
Sprung gemacht – vomNaturabmalen
– mehr oder weniger impressionistisch
– zum Fühlen des Inhaltes, zumAbstrahie-
ren – zumGeben des Extraktes.” (A. Ho-
berg (Ed.), Wassily Kandinsky und Gabriele
Münter in Murnau und Kochel, 1902-1914.
Briefe und Erinnerungen, Munich 1994, pp.
45f.)
Landscape played a central role in Münter’s
work, is one of the artist’s most popular
subjects, and was also her personal favo-
urite. She covered the most varied range
of landscapes, experimented with colours,
light and types of weather, and so created
a palette of the most diverse works.
In her painting Münter concentrated on
sharp forms and contours, ignoring the
detail and reducing the landscape to its
essential simplicity. The paintings consist
of colour planes, which interact harmo-
niously. They depict concrete, yet abstrac-
ted landscapes. The flat compositions,
the absence of shadow, and the framing
of individual planes are Münter‘s stylistic
devices, in which the present painting is
unequalled. The central barren tree is a
motif which Münter made use of in several
works. In “Vereiste Strasse” she places the
trunk in the centre of the picture. The leaf-
less branches rise up in the red sky. The
snow lies on the meadow and is punctua-
ted with isolated patches of green grass,
not yet or no longer covered in snow. The
title of the painting is evident from the icy
blue of the street.
Our painting “Vereiste Straße” from 1911
was produced within the context of a
series of winter pictures (paintings and
drawings) from the winter of 1910/1911,
which with the sparing quality of the pic-
torial material and dominance of the line,
mark a change in style, which is clearly di-
stinct from the pictures of 1910 with their
contoured areas of colour. The contour
line seems to have become independent,
and to have taken control of the picture. In
this painting the dark outer line still marks
the contours of the colour areas, but the
line frees itself from this role and gains
autonomy as a graphic element. “Whoever
looks carefully at my paintings, there they
will find the draughtsman” wrote Gabriele
Münter looking back in 1952.
What is notable in this composition is how
Münter succeeded in causing the corpo-
reality of the areas of colour to recede
and the lines, with their graphic function,
to come to the fore. In this way, individual
pictorial motifs are established as stable
components of her pictures.
Together with other important Expres-
sionist painters such as Franz Marc and
of course Kandinsky, she is one of the
founding members of the Munich Blaue
Reiter group.
Although Münter was at the centre of
the Blaue Reiter, she never took up the
development towards abstraction, but
remained within a painting style which is
abstracted, but still figurative. In Decem-
ber 1911 the first Blaue Reiter exhibition
(“Die erste Ausstellung der Redaktion der
Blauen Reiter”) opened, showing around
43 works by 14 artists, of which 5 were by
Münter. The painting presented at auction
here was produced in the same year. A
second, somewhat larger example, was
part of this unique exhibition and thereby
underlines the importance of our “Vereiste
Strasse”.
CHF 200 000 / 300 000
(€ 185 190 / 277 780)