This painting combines everything that Murnau meant to Gabriele Münter. "Der blaue Berg" (The Blue Mountain) was created in 1930. Around this time, following a challenging personal period, she returned to her “Russen-Haus” (the “Russian House”), which she had bought in 1909 when she was with Wassily Kandinsky. The place provided the setting for an artistic breakthrough and a brief period of personal fulfillment. However, breaking up with Kandinsky in 1914 and the disappointed hope of a reunion led to difficult years. Only through her relationship with Dr. Johannes Eichner, whom she met in Berlin at the end of 1927, the artist regained personal balance. It was Eichner who encouraged her to return to this special place. Hence, “Blauer Berg” can be understood as a welcome picture. She turned to the mountain motif that spread out right in front of her house, choosing this cone-shaped mountain and placing it prominently in the center of the picture. In this 'welcome picture,' she consciously revisited compositions of the 'Blue Rider' period and the early days in the Blue Land. The view over the Murnau Marshes to the mountains has always been a central motif for the artist. In the painting “Blauer Kegelberg,” Gabriele Münter adopts an abstract composition. Münter reduces the landscape to distinct planes of color. There is no staffage, such as trees or houses. She presents the solid, calm landscape clearly and concisely. It may also represent a return to her roots in her early days in Murnau when she was deeply involved with reverse glass painting and the emotional impact of these rural votive pictures. In this two-dimensional representation, Münter attempted to capture the scene and the spiritual essence of nature and her emotions. The mighty blue that recurs in variations in the distance not only represents the typical hue of the mountains in the so-called 'Blue Land' but can also be associated with the meaning that Kandinsky formulated in his essay 'The Spiritual in Art': “This gift of deepening we find in the blue [..]. The deeper the blue becomes, the more it calls man into infinity, awakening a longing for the pure and, ultimately, the transcendental. It is the color of the sky as we imagine it from the sound of the word heaven” (quoted from: W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Munich 1912, p. 77). [EH]