GABRIELE MÜNTER PHOTOGRAPHER OF AMERICA 1898-1900

GABRIELE MÜNTER PHOTOGRAPHER OF AMERICA 1898-1900

Gabriele Münter Recollections of America 1

 

My brother Carl noted down what my father told him, in the year before he died, about his personal history. In addition, now and again, my mother would tell me something of the past, and that can help to fill out the picture. My mother was the oldest of the nine children of J.B. Scheuber, a master carpenter, who emigrated to America in 1846, with his family and a few assistants. Minna was already nine years old at the time and there were already five children in the family. From an early age she looked after her younger siblings. When Carl F. Münter sought her hand in marriage, her parents expressed their concern as to what would happen if Minna got married, since their second child, Al, who was the family member in charge of serving customers, could not take her place. Aunt Al told me that herself in St. Louis. Al heard these nightly conversations and determined that she would take Minna’s place. [. . .] While we were out walking by the banks of the Rhein in Coblenz my mother told me that the first time she saw my father was when she was sitting in her schoolroom on the day of her graduation party. A young man with big, bright blue eyes looked in through the window of the classroom and made an impression on her. It was, to be sure, some time afterwards that the same man invited her to join him on a buggy ride and proposed to her. She discovered only later that he had already sought her hand in marriage from her father and that did not please her at all. She set up home there, ran the house and the practice with the help of negro slaves, and everything went very well. The War and the fact that my father had to help out on the side of the South, whereas his sympathies were with the North, led him to return to Germany. And so they sailed across the ocean. On the crossing the ship was hit by a storm. “All hands to the pumps” — it was a situation of great danger; the ship could go under. My father divided out his money in case they should be separated. But everything worked out all right and they made it to port. Then came the successful years of life in Berlin — he was one of the three American dentists [“American dentists” in English in the text] — in the ’60s and ’70s. My father served patriotically in the war [of 1870-71] until he returned to the Ruhr, his old home. Two sons and two daughters arrived in ’63, ’66, ’67 and ’77 and in ’78 the family moved to my father’s native Herford and settled in a stately house with a large garden on the Bielefeld Road, alongside which the river Aa flows. (4-page handwritten manuscript, 15 November, 1956)

My father was the oldest of the five children of a civil servant in Herford. He was apprenticed to a merchant. He was not happy with the government and made his opinions known. His father was alerted by his superiors to the danger of the situation and advised to send the young man abroad. He was outfitted, given the needed clothing and both parents took him to Bremen where he was to board ship. Here his mother secretly slipped him her savings (five Thaler), so that he would not be completely without means. They took a room at an inn. The parents slept in the bed, the young man camped on the floor in front of the bed. On arrival in New Y. he was able to visit the city thanks to the money he got from his mother, then he met a German peddler who filled his bag, in order to help him out. Once he had successfully sold the goods at a profit and settled with the peddler, he set out on his own with his share of the profit. Then he got a job with a merchant in Tennessee. He became acquainted with a Prof. at the dental college who observed with admiration his manual dexterity and suggested to him that he take up dentistry and become his assistant. And so he began his studies, which he completed with distinction. After he had served out his time as an assistant, he set up on his own, stayed on in the country, married, and soon earned a fortune. (+ Traveled home, bought his parents a house, a piano, and took his brother Gustav, who in the meantime had become a doctor, back with him to America; although in the end Gustav preferred to settle down as a successful doctor in Herford.) My father was driven out by the Emancipation War [i.e. the Civil War], in which he had to participate on the side of the Southern states; he disposed of his possessions with the loss of most, and settled successfully in Berlin as one of three American doctors of dental surgery. [“American doctors of dental surgery” in English in the text] He served in the war of 1870, got sick in the course of it, and in 1877, in my first year of life, retired to our house on Bielefeld Road in his hometown of Herford. But the world there had become too small for him. My brother August wanted to join my mother’s relatives in America and he completed his studies there. He caught pneumonia there and my mother crossed the ocean to take care of him. In 1882-83, our first years in Koblenz, Aunt Jettchen came to run our house until Mother’s return. I was seven, Emmy fifteen. Charly had completed his one-year of army national service in Giessen and had come home, where Father had the opportunity tell him his life story. Charly later wrote it up. August received the news of Father’s death in America and, deathly ill already, came home to Mother. He was musically and artistically gifted. My first experience of being admired in an understanding way was when August accidentally got to see a childish little drawing I had made “for fun.” I couldn’t do that, he said.

(4-page handwritten manuscript, fragment, 15 April, 1956)

August was thirteen or fourteen years older than me. He had pneumonia. I remember how Mama treated his illness at home with eggs and cognac. But he wanted to get away from Father’s strictness by going over to Mother’s siblings in America. So that he would be allowed to undertake the journey, he intimidated Uncle Gustav into pronouncing him in good health. He was much loved by the relatives in America, but he did not exercise caution and fell seriously ill again. He passed his exam with distinction and Mama traveled over to the U.S. to nurse him back to health. During her absence, Aunt Jettchen took care of her brother’s household in Coblenz. That must have been in 1884 or 1885. Mama was back home again when, in 1886, my father suddenly died. At that point August came home. Mama’s heart had been affected by all the agitation. August was deathly ill. Both he and Mama had to be hospitalized. Charly. Emmy and I made the move, in all probability without them, from Schlossstrasse to 1 Clemensstrasse. Charly (born October, 66) was more than ten and Emmy (born June, 69) almost eight years older than me. At one point we spent the night in a hotel and had our evening meal and tea served by the waiter upstairs in our room. Emmy and Charly carried on as if I were their child. (Charly had a separate bedroom.) Later, once we had settled into the Clemensstrasse, Mama and August came to live with us again.

August died in 1887 or 1888. Very hard on Mama. We were all very attached to her – she lived only for us. Charly too was a very good son. Out of consideration for her, he did not marry until after her death. He could not bring himself to do so before that. Mama had given Emmy permission to travel to the U.S.A. to visit our relatives there. We had moved to the Kurfürsten- strasse in the new suburb. Suddenly, in the fall of 1887 [error for 1897], Mama died. She was buried in Herford. Emmy was determined to make the family visit to America and began preparing for the trip. Out of the blue, on a visit to us in Coblenz, the oldest of our Herford cousins said to me: Surely you won’t let your only sister travel to America on her own.

You must go with her. And so I asked Emmy if she would like me to go along with her and she said she would. So the two of us went there together. In the fall of ‘98 I was 21 years old and she was 29. During the first days on ship I was seasick, though not too seriously, and slept a lot while she had a good time and flirted. There was an interesting young Dutch fellow on board. Emmy later confessed to me, after they became engaged, that she had thought it was me he was interested in. But she had to give him up, as Charly naively and as if it were perfectly natural told her to in a letter. He (Charly) had made inquiries and had received unfavorable reports about the man and he warned Emmy that he was a dowry hunter and had an old and strong relationship with a woman in Holland. Emmy would have to console herself. She got over it. The Dutchman invited us both (since I was needed as a chaperone) to travel with him to Niagara Falls. We stayed first with Aunt Al, our girl cousins and our young boy cousin Conrad – then John came and took us to Moorefield. Emmy monopolized him completely and he was completely taken by her. Aunt Carrie came up with the phrase “Emmy will put out Ella [i.e.

Gabriele] of anything” [in English in the text]. Little Ida told me that. I stayed home while Emmy went on trips with John in the “buggy” (a two-seater). On one occasion the horses were harnessed to the cart and thus Ida and I could go along with them to Batesville. I felt sorry for John, for he was serious about Emmy and she was not serious about him, and I said as much to Emmy. She got angry and mean and I wanted to leave her. She was afraid she would be disgraced and begged me to stay with her, and I yielded to her entreaties. After that we were reasonably at peace with one another.

(5-page handwritten manuscript, partly sing both sides of the page, 26-27 March, 1959)

I have been awake for a long time and am telling myself stories from the past.

(. . .) Our first stop was in St. Louis, with Aunt Al, Mama’s oldest sister, the next in line after her

– so, born at the end of the 1850s. (. . .) She was the one who placed herself in front of her father when the soldiers set him on the bridge to be shot, and so saved his life. Aunt Al had four children. 1) Lulu – about Emmy’s age. Worked in a men’s clothing factory. She later married. A policeman. Not a good marriage. One son. Supposedly didn’t do well. 2) Kate – already married. Nice man. Joe Buchheimer, a glassblower. A five-year-old daughter Mildred. Likeable kid. Supposedly became a singer and was twice married. 3) Bertie. Never married. Very pleasant girl. 4) Conrad. A glassblower like his brother-in-law. A nice, quiet young fellow. About my age at the time, around 21. He later married and died young. Our cousin Leila Hamilton-Davidson from Plainview was in St. Louis at the time – a young widow with a five-year-old child, Annie Maud Davidson. We met them again in their home in Plainview. John Schreiber came and took us to Moorefield. While I was sleeping and paying no attention, Emmy was already forming a friendship with John. John owned the mill in Moorefield, purchased with money that Mama had lent him. In Moorefield there were John, Annie (Schreiber) Wade, who soon after bore her son, Paul. At that time, John’s business was the leading one. Minnie, 18 years old, was at times not there – was she in service? Ida was part of the time in Moorefield, part of the time up at Schreiberhill. As long as it was winter and there was (less often) snow, we were in John’s wooden house, under which the pigs wandered around. A small stove – which I have eternalized in a drawing of it — was set in the little living room, “for the German girls” [in English in the text]. Aunt Carrie lived with her “old man” [in English in the text] at Schreiberhill. It was probably through Ida that I learned of remarks made by Aunt Carrie: “Emmy will put Ella out of anything” [in English in the text]. Ida’s own comment was “Cousin Ella is always alright, Cousin Emmy wants to be patted” [in English in the text]. I had left my bicycle, which I handed over to Lulu on our return journey, in St. Louis and Emmy had her violin with her. I scratched on it a few times, though Emmy wanted none of it, and in this way I became a little acquainted with the violin.

In St. Louis I had rented a piano and composed a song on it entitled “The River and I” [in English in the text] with a three-part chorus “Silently flows the river” [in English in the text]. It was a lot of work. When I finally made a clean copy of it, I destroyed the clean copy instead of my scribbled notes and I took the matter so tragically that I also destroyed the notes, which were hardly usable any more. So both in St. Louis and in Moorefield I kept myself busy at home with drawing and music, while Emmy was out being entertained.

(4-page handwritten manuscript, 6 April, 1956)

That was in the years 1898-1900 when, with my older sister Emmy, I made a little family trip [Vetterlesreise] to my mother’s relatives, who had all become Americans. My father had met my mother in Savannah in the state of Tennessee and brought her back to Germany during the slave wars [i.e. the American Civil War]. Her sisters and brothers were all settled over there, married and working as bankers, tradesmen or small farmers. We spent most of our time in the countryside in Arkansas and Texas, in primitive conditions, in houses without any plumbing, and devoid of all comfort. You rode for hours across the prairie to get a sack of flour. I did it once and the sack fell from the horse. Getting it back up again was quite a feat, since it was too heavy for me to lift. But the freedom we enjoyed in the vastness of nature was beautiful. And the good people were fun to be with.

There was genuine breaking-in there of wild mustangs, as we see it often in the movies, in the form of a grand performance that makes us laugh till the tears start running down our cheeks. The young horses, which have never yet carried a rider on their back, are ridden for the first time bareback. When the animal feels a weight on it, it starts to rear up, kick, jounce, and leap wildly around in order to shake the rider off its back. A hard battle begins between man and horse – more entertaining to observe than to engage in. Sometimes the rider flies off into the dust. We also went once to Niagara Falls and admired the spectacle of nature. I have retained no memories of that. I have never cared much for grand photographic views. For that reason the impression has not stayed with me.

I did a lot of sketching at that time. I sketched portraits of all my relatives, the old folk and the babies alike. These are straightforward, objective pieces of work, free of any artistic concern with composition, but they have the advantage of offering lively images of the people represented in them.

By that time I had had a little instruction in drawing. When I came home after school, and gradually came to find reading, music, horse-riding, bicycling, dancing and excursions on the Rhine and into the Moselle valley too boring, my older brother arranged for me to go to the nearest art city, Düsseldorf, for art lessons. But the instruction there was disappointingly dull and dreary. I gave up after a few weeks, just when my mother died. (My father had already died when I was ten years old.)

I did not begin my true study of art until I was 24. That was in Munich, in the Easter of 1901. At the time the Art Academy did not accept female students. So they found a substitute in the League of Lady Artists School, where they received instruction from highly capable teachers. After one semester I was promoted to the class of Angelo Jank and, under him, from the head modeling class to the class where students worked from nude models. But I found the weeks- long fiddling over a drawing from a model too boring. In my third semester I had a passing shot in a school at woodcutting, then sculpture, and by chance landed up with Kandinsky at the Phalanx school in the summer of 1902.

(6-page typescript with inscription, in Münter’s hand, “Eichner Draft of Münter Autobiography” [Eichner Entwurf zu Mü Autobiogr.]) L.G. expresses his thanks to Dr. Annegret Hoberg for granting permission to translate these documents, first published by her, from the original German.

Show 1 footnote

  1. Gabriele Münter.Die Reise nach Amerika: Photographien 1899-1900, ed. Helmut Friedel (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 2006), pp. 217-220. Translation by L.G.