GABRIELE MÜNTER PHOTOGRAPHER OF AMERICA 1898-1900

The American connection.

Münter had thus had very little formal artistic training of any consequence when it was suggested in 1898, after her return from Düsseldorf and following the death of her mother in November of the previous year, that she accompany her sister Emmy — eight years her senior — on a trip to the United States to visit their mother’s family. What she brought with her to America was essentially her longstanding natural gift and passion for sketching the objects and, in particular, the people around her. And she did indeed do a lot of sketching — of individuals, of relatives old and young, of men, women, and children, as well as of scenes and landscapes (Figs. 42, 43, 48-50, 91).

In 1899, however, a few months after arriving in the U.S., Münter was the recipient of a gift, in the form of a Bull’s Eye Kodak Box camera, ¹ and photography soon replaced sketching — though it never eliminated it altogether — as the future artist’s primary means of recording the persons and scenes she was discovering in the still lightly settled and undeveloped territories that were home to most of the relatives she and her sister visited.

Before we approach the photographs themselves, and consider whether or to what extent, like the very young Münter’s drawings, their obviously documentary and recording function might have been compatible with a more or less conscious artistic impulse, an account of the artist’s American family connection is called for. It may surprise even many who are familiar with Münter’s art work that the parents of this outstanding modern German artist met in Savannah, Tennessee, in 1857, when both were immigrants from Germany, that they were married there, and that they lived in the U.S. until 1864, when the artist’s father, Carl Friedrich Münter, whose sympathies, as a resident of the South, were inconveniently with the North in the Civil War, decided to return to Germany with his young wife. The son of a government official in Herford, Westphalia, a former Imperial city that had come under Prussian rule in the mid-17^th century, Carl Friedrich had emigrated to the United States in 1847, the young man’s outspoken criticisms of the government having led one of his father’s superiors to advise that he be shipped out of the country. Though he brought few resources with him, Carl Friedrich prospered in the United States and even obtained a degree in dental surgery, which served him well on his return to Germany, where he set himself up as one of three “American dentists” in the Prussian capital at a prominent site on Unter den Linden. The practice flourished for about ten years and all the couple’s children were born in Germany, the oldest, August, almost immediately after the family’s return, Carl (“Charly”) in October 1866, Emmy in June 1869, and Gabriele (“Ella”) in 1877. After giving up his dental practice in the mid-1870s, however, Carl Friedrich followed a checkered career, his health declined, and he died in 1886.

Münter’s mother, Wilhelmina (“Minna”) Scheuber, born in Southern Germany as the oldest child of a cabinet-maker in the village of Siglingen (Württemberg), was nine years old when her father, Johann Gottlieb Scheuber,  emigrated with his family, in the 1840’s, to the United States. After continuing for a while in his line of business as a cabinet-maker in New York, he moved to Tennessee, where he set himself up in the wood trade. His children all married in America, and established families of their own in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. They were completely Americanized and many of them lived the hard life of the early settlers. Even after she returned with her husband to Germany, it is said, Minna Münter was never completely at home in the German language. It was this extensive network of family relations – aunts, cousins, cousins’ husbands and children — that Gabriele Münter and her sister Emmy set out from Rotterdam in September, 1898, a year after the death of their mother, to get to know. (Figs. 44-47)

They remained in America for two years, until October, 1900, traveling constantly from one family member’s home to another’s, but also spending long periods of time with certain relatives’ families. Following her natural bent and custom, Gabriele frequently sketched both the family members and their living conditions. After receiving the gift of her Kodak box camera, however, she took to photographing what once had been exclusively the object of her sketching.

In the opening essay, “Gabriele Münter in Amerika,” of the remarkable volume edited by Helmut Friedel and referred to above, Annegret Hoberg, the author of numerous insightful books and articles on Münter and on modern German art in general, has summarized the itinerary followed by the sisters and given an informative account, based on Münter’s diary entries and sketchbook, of the complex family network that they explored and forged links of affection to. This part of Dr. Hoberg’s wide-ranging text is reproduced, with her permission, below, in only occasionally abbreviated English translation.

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In Gabriele Münter’s little pocket diary for the years 1898, 1899, and 1900, the most important dates of the journey have been noted as follows:
1898.

27 Sept. “to Rotterdam” 29 Sept. “ship departs”

9 Oct. “arrival in New York” 20 Oct. “leave for St. Louis” 22 Oct. “arrive in St. Louis” 18 Dec. “leave St. Louis”

Dec. “to Niagara”

Dec. “Niagara Falls, Buffalo” return to St. Louis

31 Dec. “‘Uncle Toms Cabin’ at the ‘Imperial,’ St. Louis”

 

1899.

6 Feb. “to Moorefield”

19 May. “mill running again” [In English in text-LG] 8 June. “to Marshall” [in English in text-LG]

from 12 August, for two weeks, “Cowboy Reunion” [at Plainview] Nov. “Donohoos”

1900.

3 Feb. “Fort Worth” 4 Feb. “Abilene”

5 Feb. “Guion”

14 February. “Rights Partie Toscola” 18 Feb. “Fishers Red Lake”

23 Feb. “Guion”

27 Feb. “to Abilene” [in English in text-LG] 7 March “Buffalo Gap”

13 April “Willie 18”

16 May “leave Guion” [in English in text — LG] 17 May “leave Abilene” [in English in text — LG] 18 May “arr. Marshall” [in English in text – LG]

There at end of May 2 x “Jette, Sue Bell swimming” 11 July “leave Marshall”

12 July “Moorefield”

28 July “leave Moorfield” [in English in text — LG]

29 July “arr. St. Louis, ‘Forest Park’” [in English in text — LG] Aug. 3. “riverex” [pedition] [in English in text– LG]

1 Oct. “lve. St. Louis” 2 Oct. “to Hoboken”

8 Oct. “lve. New York” 19 Oct. “Hamburg”

22 Oct. “Bonn”

5 Nov. Coblenz

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In the course of the twelve-day crossing Gabriele made drawings in three sketchbooks [. . .] but there are only a few drawings of fellow-passengers and in a very small notebook [. . .] a double page with a rapidly drawn outline of Manhattan, the East River, the Hudson, [. . .] Hoboken, the Battery, and Broadway. [. . .] (Abb. 8) ²
The sisters took a room in the Hotel Naegeli in Hoboken and explored the city with the help of a friend of their father’s, the newspaper editor C.F. Liebetreu. [. . .] On October 20, Gabriele and Emmy traveled by train to St. Louis, a journey through several states that took two days and two nights. St. Louis was the first stop on an itinerary designed to allow them to get to know the members of their mother’s widely dispersed family, among them Minna’s four sisters, all of whom had remained in the U.S.A.; hence all the descendants of the Scheubers along with their husbands, children, sons- and daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. The second oldest sister of their mother, Albertine Happel, known as Al, had married a banker and lived in St. Louis, where she led a comfortable urban life. In one of the texts in which she recorded her recollections [see the attached translation of this text] Münter gives a brief description of this family with its three daughters Lulu, Kate, and Bertie, son Conrad, son-in-law Joe Buchheimer, grand-daughter Mildred Buchheimer, and — newly arrived with her little daughter Annie Maud on a visit from Plainview, Texas — young widowed cousin Leila Hamilton-Davidson.[. . .] Gabriele Münter’s sketchbook bears lively witness to this female-dominated family and its members, including both 5-year old girls. Münter seems to have been particularly drawn to her cousin Bertie and inspired to make sketches of her. (Abb. 10 [fig. 48])

The sisters stayed with their relatives in St. Louis for over three months, enjoying visits to the theater, concert performances, and other urban pleasures. [. . .]On February 6, Gabriele and Emmy Münter left St. Louis. Picked up and accompanied by their cousin John Schreiber, they traveled to Moorefield, Arkansas, not far from Batesville, where their aunt Carrie Schreiber, another sister of their mother’s, had been settled for many a year. [. . .] As Carrie’s son, John Schreiber ran the so-called “Roller mills” for producing wood in Moorefield. To this the family owed a certain measure of wellbeing. His pregnant sister Annie (Schreiber) Wade ran the household for him, and the young cousins Minna and Ida also lived there. In a later retrospective text of 1956, Gabriele Münter filled out this account: “Then, at the beginning of 1899, we were in Moorefield, Ark. – cousin John Schreiber’s mill was in the valley while up on ‘Schreiberhill’ there was Aunt Carrie with her elderly husband, who was already ailing, and 15-year- old Ida. We too were up there for a time in that lonely spot. One rode through unspoiled woods and fields of corn (and probably also cotton). A tree with large white blossoms was called ‘dog wood.’”The recollections of Moorefield resonate with the experience of the landscape on the edge of the Ozark Plateau and of an overwhelmingly powerful nature. Through it the sisters became acquainted with a very different aspect of American life than hitherto. Life in the country, in the simple wooden houses of Moorefield and Schreiberhill, beneath which the pigs were partly quartered, was close to nature and followed the rhythm of the seasons. [. . .] Nature here was nevertheless an idyll in comparison with what awaited the sisters at their relatives’ places in Texas. For the first time Münter’s sketchbook from the time of the Moorefield visit contains, along with many sketches of relatives, landscape views, and drawings of some houses in the settlement. These indicate that she was obviously more interested in the spare, structural aspect of things, the criss- crossing of lines, than in atmospherics or pleasing impressions. (Abb. 11 [fig. 49])

An interesting comparison can be made with a photograph (signed “Marshall 1899, Ella”) in which she has represented herself against the background of a large plant stretching geometrically upwards. She also frequently sketched the Rolling mills, a thoroughly impressive structure with many large wooden buildings, among them the vertically tall “engine room” and the horizontally extended sawmill, of which she also took several photographs. (Abb. 12, 13; Taf. 79, 94 [figs. 50, 51] )

 

Also in the same sketchbook, it is worth noting Münter’s earliest compositional studies in pencil, with lines serving to hold them together schematically and hand-written abbreviations indicating the different colors to be applied to the various surfaces, just as she would characteristically do later in the sketches she made for her oil paintings.

There are many fewer entries in Münter’s pocket diary for this time about activities and outings than had been the case in St. Louis. On a few occasions she took note of a family musical evening or of going to church. Still, the German guests were able to do some things with Ida and Minna, such as have a picnic, explore caves, or go for a swim in the nearby river, which also drove the roller mill. Near the mill there was clearly only a very primitive way of fording the river, stepping stones for those on foot and a shallow crossing for horse-drawn carts. From now on and for more than a year, until their return to St. Louis in July 1900, horse and cart were to be Emmy’s and Gabriele’s chief means of transportation. Thanks to many riding lessons and time spent horseback riding in Coblenz, both were excellent horsewomen. As a result, they not only could get around on horseback, they were also quite comfortable occupying the driver’s box on a horse-drawn cart. This was to be demonstrated during their upcoming stays with relatives in Texas.

First, on June 8, 1899, they went on, still by train, to the Scheuber family’s place in Marshall, Texas, east of Fort Worth, where Ella’s uncle had made use of machinery to dry out a forest area full of streams and prepare it for the cultivation of rice, cotton, and sugar cane. These relatives were planters, much mocked as fenced-in field-mice by the Texas cattle ranchers. The girls’ cousin, Willie Scheuber, belonged to the third generation of settlers. Only English was spoken here. In her Recollections of 1956. Münter describes this family in which she was to spend many months: “Then we traveled on to the family of Willie Scheuber. There were three little daughters there; Bessie, almost grown up, had a pony on which she got around; 10-year-old Vergie, a charming child, and five-year-old Jennie Lee. Later, when we stopped off again on our return journey back to Germany, a son arrived on the scene. [ . . .] Willie Scheuber’s sister, Annie Smith, also lived in Marshall with a five-year old daughter, Allie May. [. . .] Willie Scheuber’s mother had been widowed, had remarried, and was now Mrs. Allen. She and the four Allen children lived with Annie. There was a piano and there were books at the Scheubers’ and that kept me busy.” Willie Scheuber, the son of a brother of Minna Münter, is often represented in Gabriele Münter’s photographs from Marshall, as are his three daughters, especially Virgie and Jennie Lee. (Taf. 50, 59, 60 [figs. 52, 53]) His mother, as already noted, had remarried and thus no longer bore the name Scheuber. She too stood or sat as a model for a series of impressive photographs by Münter, often along with the Allen children, such as Bessie Allen, and other female relatives. (Taf. 44, 56, 57 [figs. 54, 55]) Her still younger son, Bruce Allen, Willie Scheuber’s step- brother, is also made visible to the viewer in a number of lively photos, in one case as a young soldier posing with his gun and in another, seated next to another young man, in an attractively and carefully executed head and shoulders portrait. (Taf. 61, 74 [fig. 56])

If one judges by the pictures taken by Münter as a whole, the town of Marshall appears to have been a relatively verdant and at the same time upward- striving place, with commercial streets and brick houses in its center and fertile meadows between widely separated, solidly built wooden houses and farms, on which there was a good deal of cattle-raising. The Scheubers lived here in a – compared with John Schreiber’s place in Moorfield – grand wooden house with several verandas and balconies. Münter often refers to this rather comfortable domestic arrangement, including the already mentioned piano and books. [. . .]

Still, the sisters did not stay in Marshall for very long, though they did pass through it again on their return journey. In mid-July 1899 at the latest, they traveled on to Plainview, Texas, to attend the marriage of a cousin of the Donohoo and Hamilton families. “The journey to the northwestern part of Texas was to take three days! The last stretch had to be covered by horse and cart, there being as yet no railway line into the Texas panhandle.” In Plainview, located in the extreme West of Texas near the New Mexico state line, in the still fairly sparsely populated Great Plains, between Lubbock and Amarillo, Gabriele and Emmy Münter were to acquire familiarity with the pioneering life of the American settler, [. . .] and for over half a year they were to live among “Cowboys.” Founded just twelve years before the arrival of the sisters, Plainview was like an oasis dug up out of the ground at the northern edge of the desert- like high plateau of Llano Estacado. As we can see from Ella’s photos, the settlement consisted of a single street lined by crudely built warehouses where cattle-men coming from widely dispersed ranches supplied themselves with necessities. In the burned-out plain around the Salt Fork River Joe N. Donohoo, trusting to his luck, had one day hammered a crude shack together out of wooden planks and used a mammoth billboard to advertise it as a Store or Post Office. Thus it came about that in the heart of the treeless prairie a trading centre developed in which Uncle Joe achieved great success as a “dealer in cattle.” (Taf. 2 [fig. 57])

Uncle Joe Donohoo was the husband of Lou Donohoo, one of four sisters, including mother Minna, who are still to be seen on a family photo of 1860. (See Abb. 3 [fig. 58]) In the interim, however, she had died. The fourth sister, Annie Hamilton, had also settled in Plainview, and with her husband Bud had founded the Hamilton line. Her niece Gabriele recorded her little wooden house in a striking photo which she entitled “Home sweet home at Aunt Annie’s.” (Taf. 1, 3 [fig. 59]) ³ On July 18, at the latest, Emmy and Gabriele arrived in Plainview, as indicated by the date of a fairly large drawing on which, next to the date, “18.VII.1899,” Gabriele had also inscribed an amusing pun on the name of the individual she had sketched: “Minnie Miller D’o’no who” – in itself an indication of how well Gabriele had mastered the English language. From that time on, in fact, nearly all her inscriptions and almost all her notes on the journey are in English. She was particularly fascinated by “Uncle Joe” and on December 30, she drew him on a piece of his business stationary in his cap and spectacles, reading intently or bent over his order books. Three lines scribbled around him define the actual picture of him and turn the small but accurate study into a self- contained, independent portrait. (Abb. 15 [fig. 60]) Another drawing, which [. . .] likewise shows Uncle Joe, his legs raised, reading, bears the date (in English) of the previous week (“sunday 23.VII.99”). It is located in a rather large sketchbook about the size of a school copybook, to which a series of well-executed, full-page portraits of other male members of the family was also confided. In most of the often very young faces that Münter succeeds in characterizing by means of few, finely drawn pencil lines, the tough, enterprising, spirit of the cowboy is combined with openness and calm self-assurance, traits that in a surprisingly impressive way will once again come to the fore in her photographs.

John N. Donohoo had set up his business in collaboration with his son-in- law, R.C. Ware, his daughter Lena’s husband. From the Hamilton family line Arthur Hamilton and “strapping Hal” especially were great horsemen, cowboys, and cattle breeders. They are to be seen alongside their horses or cattle on a series of photos — among them some that Münter herself did not take but received as gifts from other family members. Hal Hamilton was in fact the cousin to attend whose wedding the sisters had come to Plainview. An event of at least equal importance was the “Cowboy Reunion” that began on August 12 and went on for two weeks. A not very sharply defined photo taken, according to Münter’s inscription on the back, by “Mr. Cowover’s codac” shows Gabriele, at the highpoint of the Cowboy Reunion on August 17-19, 1899, in a large beribboned sunhat in the midst of a company of people gathered under a tent-like canopy; at the edge of the group, on the right, Emmy is looking directly at the camera, while the gentleman seated at the front of the group is proudly holding an enormous watermelon — at least one assumes that is what it is from the inscription “Watermelon” on the back of the photo. (Abb. 16)

It is not absolutely clear from Münter’s diary how long the sisters remained in Plainview. All the indications are, however, that they did not return to Marshall before May, 1900, and that they stayed with the Donohoos for over half a year, until they left for Guion, Texas in February, 1900. [. . .]

On February 3, the sisters traveled by way of Fort Worth and, in a south- westerly direction, once again through Abilene and beyond, to Guion, Texas. With that, they came to the last “outpost” on their family trip to the U.S.A. The Graham family lived here, feeding itself by farming — their older, widowed cousin Jane Lee, and her children, eighteen-year-old Willie, adolescent Benlah, and the smaller boys, Johnnie, Dallas, and Fred. Guion was nothing but a tiny, barren settlement around a railroad station in the broad plains of “west-central Texas.” The station was shut down in 1938 and today the place, which still counted eighteen inhabitants in 1947, no longer appears on the map. Once again, Gabriele and Emmy Münter shared the simple country life of their relatives over several intensely experienced months, marked by obviously friendly relations. The steady anchor of their stay was clearly their young cousin Willie Graham. It was also Willie who rescued Gabriele when she tipped over while traveling by herself on a cart fitted with a primitive wooden chair instead of a box and proper seats. On March 2, 1900, she and Willie visited the place where this mishap occurred.(Taf. 15 [fig. 61]) They also went on trips together, to the Buffalo Gap Mountains, for instance, or to Tuscola, Abilene, or Balmonias, or for a picnic at Jim Need Creek, or to Red Lake to visit the Fishers and the Neals, families the Grahams were friendly with. Much of this is documented in an impressive set of Gabriele Münter’s photographs. (Taf. 14-27 [figs. 62-66]) Among them there is also a picture of the Grahams’ truly primitive wooden home raised above the clay soil only by two fieldstones [. . .] The inscription reads: “Emmy, the donkey, Fred, Johnnie, Dallas, our room.” (Taf. 16 [fig. 65]) [. . .]

On May 16, 1900, Münter notes in her diary “leave Guyon”, a day later “leave Abilene”, and on May 18, “arrive Marshall”. The two German visitors made their return journey from the wild west back to St. Louis and then New York slowly, following exactly the same itinerary they had set out on in 1898, only in the reverse direction. In Marshall, still in Texas, they stopped off again at Willie Scheuber’s for another two months before moving on, on July 11, to Moorefield in Arkansas. They stayed for only two short weeks with the Schreiber and Wade families, to which in the meantime another offspring had been added, and on July 29, 1900 arrived back at the Happels’ in St. Louis. They used their time here, among other things, to visit Forest Park, the great amusement park with a Japanese pagoda, much celebrated at the time, and, obviously, also a roller coaster. (Taf. 113 [fig. 84]) In August they twice took a river cruise on the Mississippi, which, judging by the numerous photographs Münter took on those occasions, made a great impression on her. (Taf. 103-111 [figs. 85-90]) On October 1, they left St. Louis and once again spent a week in New York. On October 8, 1900, they boarded the Hapag Lloyd Line’s ocean steamship “Pennsylvania” for the journey home. This ship, somewhat larger and more luxurious than the “Statendam,” docked twelve days later in Hamburg, where they first set foot again on German soil after an absence of two years.

A new chapter now opened in the lives of both sisters. Together they rented a place in Coblenz but they shared it for only a short time. Emmy, now 31 years old, was married soon afterwards to the chemistry specialist Dr. Georg Schröter, who subsequently became Director of the Chemical Institute for Veterinary Medicine in Berlin and with whom she then moved to the Imperial capital. Early in the following year Gabriele again took up her abandoned and till then rather half-heartedly pursued study of art: “My true study of art began only in Munich, in Easter 1901, when I was 24 years old.” There, at the beginning of 1902 she became a student of Wassily Kandinsky at “Phalanx,” the latter’s private art school. ⁴

Show 4 footnotes

1. On this camera, see Daniel Oggenfuss, “Kamera- und Verfahrenstechnik der Amerika-Photographien Gabriele Münters,” in Gabriele Münter. Die Reise nach Amerika: Photographien 1899-1900, pp. 189-201. On the disputed date at which it was acquired by Münter, see Annegret Hoberg, “Gabriele Münter in Amerika,” ibid., pp. 11-30, at pp. 24-26. ↩
2. The references are to the figures (Abbildungen) in Dr. Hoberg’s copiously illustrated text and to the large collection of full-page plates (Tafeln) in Gabriele Münter. Die Reise nach Amerika: Photographien 1899-1900. Many of these, but by no means all, have been reproduced in the images accompanying the present essay. Reference will be made to those, where appropriate, in square brackets, immediately following Dr. Hoberg’s reference. ↩
3. Added note by L.G.:This image is strikingly similar to a roughly contemporary photograph by Münter’s still little known contemporary, Evelyn Cameron. (Fig. 124– see appendix) ↩
4. Annegret Hoberg, “Gabriele Münter in Amerika,” in Gabriele Münter. Die Reise nach Amerika: Photographien 1899-1900 (as in “1. “A Limited Reputation in the US,” note 8), pp. 11-30. Pp. 16-23 have been translated here. See also, below, an English translation, appended to the present essay, of Münter’s own “Erinnerungen an Amerika” (ibid., pp. 217-220). All documents are preserved in the Gabriele Münter-Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Munich, which holds Münter’s private estate. ↩

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