GABRIELE MÜNTER PHOTOGRAPHER OF AMERICA 1898-1900

GABRIELE MÜNTER PHOTOGRAPHER OF AMERICA 1898-1900

 

Becoming an artist. The importance of line

 

Though influenced by Kandinsky and sharing many features with fellow Blue Rider artists August Macke and Franz Marc, Münter’s work as a painter is especially marked by bold, dark outlines defining strong, flat areas of color. (Figs. 17, 19-37) As she put it herself on one occasion, drawing seemed to come naturally to her, whereas she had to learn to paint. 1

Line – clear and simple — is no less essential to all her work than the skillful use of large areas of color. In addition, while she sympathized completely, as a painter, with the Blue Rider’s rejection of realistic or impressionistic representation and, like Kandinsky, gave up an early Impressionist manner around 1906, and while she subscribed wholeheartedly in her own artwork to the group’s goal of expressing the essence of things as grasped in the artist’s inward experience of them (Kandinsky would have said “the spiritual”) rather than in their external appearance – “I made a great leap,” as she put it herself, “from copying nature in a more or less impressionist style to feeling the content of things, abstracting, conveying an extract” 2 — Münter produced only a very small number of purely abstract paintings. In her own words, she never withdrew completely from the real world. From 1908 on, she wrote, looking back forty years afterwards, “I no longer concerned myself with the measurable, ‘correct’ form of things. And yet I never sought to ‘overcome,’ destroy or even disparage nature. I represented the world as it enthralled me and in what to me was its essence.”3

Without any idea of becoming an artist – such a career was not in her bourgeois family’s repertoire of possible destinies for a woman – Münter kept a sketchbook from a very early age. Seeing and drawing, as she put it, rather than using words, was “her thing.” 4 By 1897 when she was 20 years of age, her older brother Carl (“Charly,” as she called him) was sufficiently impressed by her unflagging commitment to drawing and by her proficiency at it, to suggest that she might take some art lessons in Düsseldorf, about a hundred miles from Coblenz where the family was then living — not, to be sure, at the celebrated Art Academy there (even if a serious career as an artist had been envisaged either by Münter herself or by her family, it would have been very difficult to arrange, since none of the established art academies admitted women at this time), but as a private student of the local painter, etcher, and lithographer Ernst Bosch (1834- 1917). Like his teachers at the Düsseldorf Academy Bosch was primarily a painter of portraits and genre scenes. 5 Münter’s talent for simplified line drawing did not impress him or appeal to him and she, on her side, was not inspired by his instruction. Within a few months she had given up and switched to another, younger, and more up-to-date teacher, Willy Spatz (1861-1931), at the so-called “Damen-Kunstschule” [Ladies’ Art School] in Düsseldorf. That turned out to be not much of an improvement and in July 1898, Münter wrote Carl that she planned to leave Düsseldorf. 6  It was not until 1901 that she again undertook more serious instruction in art, signing up for classes with Maximilian Dasio (1865-1954) and the Munich Secession artist Angelo Jank (1868-1940) at the “Schule des Künstlerinnen-Vereins” [Lady-Artists’ League School] in Munich (figs. 38-41) and it was only in the Winter of 1901-2 that she enrolled in the “Phalanx School,” newly founded in Munich by Wassily Kandinsky and his sculptor friend Wilhelm Hüsgen. Here, in a class taught by Kandinsky, her native talent was finally recognized and encouraged by her teacher.

Show 6 footnotes

  1. “Ich bin von Kindheit auf so ans Zeichnen gewöhnt, dass ich später, als ich zum Malen kam — es war in meinen zwanziger Jahren — den Eindruck hatte, es sei mir angeboren, während ich das Malen erst lernen musste.” (“Bekenntnisse und Erinnerungen,” in Gabriele Münter. Menschenbilder in Zeichnungen. Zwanzig Lichtdrucktafeln, ed. G.F. Hartlaub (as in note 5, “A Limited Reputation in the U.S”), final four unnumbered pages.) In the same vein: “Meine frühe Neigung zum Zeichnen kam ganz aus mir selbst. Als ich 14 Jahre alt war, fiel die Treffsicherheit auf, mit der ich Köpfe meiner Umgebung in blossem Umriss wiedergab” (“My early propensity for drawing came entirely from inside me. At the age of 14 the accuracy with which I depicted by means of simple outlines the heads of people in my environment attracted attention.”) (“Gabriele Münter über sich selbst,” Das Kunstwerk, vol. 2, no. 7 (1948). p. 25) Annegret Hoberg points out that in her painting from about 1906 on “Münter (was) clearly continuing to develop the Post- Impressionist technique of cloisonnisme, derived from Paul Gauguin and imparted to her by Alexej Jawlensky” (a close associate of Münter and Kandinsky). (“The Life and Work of Gabriele Münter,” in Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906-1917, exh. cat. (London: Courtauld Institute Art Gallery and Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005), pp. 21-41 )
  2. Cit. by Annegret Hoberg from an entry in Münter’s diary in “The Life and Work of Gabriele Münter,” Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906-1917 (as in the previous note), p. 27.
  3. “Von nun an (1908-LG) bemühte ich mich nicht mehr um die nachrechenbare ‘richtige’ Form der Dinge. Und doch habe ich nie die Natur ‘überwinden,’ zerschlagen oder gar verhöhnen wollen. Ich stellte die Welt dar, wie sie mir wesentlich schien, wie sie mich packte.” (“Gabriele Münter über sich selbst,” as in “1. A Limited Reputation in the US, “note 1, p. 25) In this respect, Münter seems especially close to Macke, who also tried his hand at but did not, in the end, much practice pure abstraction. Probably the Fauves, along to some extent with folk art, were the most enduring influence on her work, in contrast to Kandinsky, who — though also much affected by the Fauves and by folk art in the first decade of the 20th century — soon moved beyond them. The author of the short notice in the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery catalogue of 1960 (unsigned but probably Hatfield himself) describes her as “one of the first and most talented German Fauve painters,” and “the most dedicated of all the French or German Fauve artists. She never deserted the Fauve style of painting as the others did.”
  4. “Meine Sache ist das Sehen, das Malen und Zeichnen, nicht das Reden” (opening words of “Bekenntnisse und Erinnerungen,” as in note 1 above).
  5. On Bosch, see, see http://www.paynefinearts.com/bosch.html; http://collection.mam.org/artist.php?id=705 http://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/bosch_ernst_passing_train.htm; http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/11891.html; https://www.invaluable.com/artist/bosch- ernst-225purvl00
  6. See

    Gisela Kleine, Gabriele Münter und Wassily Kandinsky: Biographie eines Paares (as in “1.  A Limited Reputation in the US,” note 4), p. 56; Johannes Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter (as in “1.  A Limited Reputation in the US,” note 4), p. 33.