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Impressionist & Modern Art
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3225* GABRIELE MÜNTER(Berlin 1877 - 1962 Murnau)
Zigeunerwagen II. 1930.
Oil on board.
Estate stamp on the reverse.
37.7 x 45.7 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).
Placed directly in the centre of the pic-
ture, the door laid wide open, and with a
second caravan part leaning against it, the
emptiness and abandonment of the gypsy
caravan arrests our attention. This very
intense, suspenseful picture – intense in
its composition, in the choice of colours
and concept of space - marks a moment
of change, fromMünter’s period of wande-
ring to a more peaceful, stable time in her
life.
The post war years in Scandinavia after her
separation fromWassily Kandinsky, and
the 1920s, which saw frequent relocation
and a prolonged solitude, had left Gabriele
Münter deeply unsettled. In this period, it
was above all her drawings – fluid portrait
drawings of “pure line” – as well as the fa-
miliar motif of the Murnau Alpine foothills,
to which she returned again and again –
which kept her grounded. A longer stay in
Paris in 1929 /1930 with Johannes Eichler,
her second companion, lent a new impulse
to her creative work.
In the same year she travelled again to
the South of France. Here too she worked
constantly with pencil and oil, and was
inspired by the landscape and life of the
South of France. In terms of quality and
quantity, her painting during this period in
France at the beginning of the 1930s, saw
a great upturn. She fought again for her
pictorial style, swung between the tenden-
cies of “Neue Sachlichtkeit” and expressi-
onism, freed herself again and again from
perspective, sought the simplification of
form and volume with contoured areas of
colour. In the work “Zigeunerwagen II” this
struggle is tangible.
The restless, short brush strokes lend
the picture a strong dynamic, which is
heightened by the ground colour gliste-
ning through, and the permeability of the
paint. The eschewal of perspective in the
composition strengthens the presence of
the individual pictorial elements, dovetails
them, releases the individual areas of co-
lour from their intrinsic function and allows
them to stand autonomously side by side.
Of especial interest with “Zigeunerwagen
II” is the choice of subject, the openness
to experiment in subject matter, which had
already been presaged in Münter’s time in
Scandinavia.
Thanks to the inspiration from her stay in
France, her range of subjects had broa-
dened again. Instead of the peaceful
landscapes and still lifes, people and their
direct environment became the pictorial
subject matter. As with all experimentation
in subject matter, in many of the pictorial
elements there is nevertheless a return
to Münter‘s own expressionistic tradition
of the “Blauer Reiter” period. Not only
the contours of the forms, but also the
reduction in detail and the expression of
objects in geometric terms, are tied into
this pictorial language.
CHF 100 000 / 150 000
(€ 92 590 / 138 890)