New artistic ways - contoured surface painting
In a stable situation and environment, from feelings of inner well-being and personal liberation, a large number of important works, which manifested Münter's artistic breakthrough and the newly found means of expression, were created in Murnau. In the years before the First World War, she was at the height of her artistic creation. Under the influence of Kandinsky, she left divisionist late impressionism behind her in order to open up to a bolder design. Münter's contoured surface painting becomes a haunting distinct feature of the works of these years.
Clarity and simplicity - the Murnau Moos revisited
In the composition "Blick aufs Murnauer Moos" (View of the Murnau Moos), a strong work in terms of both color and form, Münter has attained an artistic progressiveness that is unusual for her otherwise mostly moderate expressionist creation. This is where her artistic signature, newly developed in exchange with Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky, shows: her ability to reduce what she sees to essential forms and to freely use colors in their purest form, detached from the impression of nature. She encloses the strongly contrasting colored areas with tight black contours and thus creates a strong composition characterized by closeness and an increased expression. Above all, there are two color groups that Gabriele Münter contrasted here so effectively: green and blue, merely the rose clouds that develop from a bluish purple vary the color scheme while they maintain the form. What makes this landscape so unusual is that Münter did not only reduces the colors to an extremely high degree, but also unified the forms in a highly schematic way: clouds, mountains and trees are only seen as colored triangles without internal structures. A spatial perspective is completely dispensed with and the landscape impression is obtained from a two-dimensional juxtaposition of luminous color values. The artist's memories contain the following passage, which seems to be almost programmatic for our wonderful landscape: "More and more I grasped the clarity and simplicity of this world. Especially in foehn, the mountains made for a strong completion of the picture, black-blue. This was the color I loved the most. " (G. Münter, quote from: A. Hoberg, Gabriele Münter, Cologne 2017, p. 31). If one compares Münter's wonderful creation with Jawlensky's painting "Rote Giebel" (Red Gables) from the same year, today part of the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, one can see the common, progressive approach the members of the "Neue Künstlervereinigung München", founded in 1909, pursued. Kandinsky's works from this year - such as his famous painting "Murnau mit Kirche I" (Lenbachhaus, Munich) – also celebrate color values and increasingly use impression of the landscape only as a representational starting point for a highly abstract conception of color and form. During this period, however, Kandinsky remained even more firmly attached to the design of the individual color fields in a late-Impressionist manner, as the dotted and sometimes still shimmering, modulated paint application shows, while Münter, like Jawlensky, had already achieved stronger flatness and monochromy.
Münter's time in the 'Blue Land' a highlight in her creation
After both artists had stayed in Murnau together several times, Münter bought the house on Kottmüllerallee at the urge of Kandinsky. To the east it had a view of the village and the church hill and to the south it overlooked the foothills of the Murnau Moos, where the two artists would spent a lot of time together until their separation in August 1914. The early Murnau period, which immediately preceded the founding of the "Blauer Reiter", was an extremely fruitful period for both artists, and for Münter it can well be considered the glorious heyday of her artistic work. It is regarded as a kind of nucleus of the "Blaue Reiter" and at the same time marked the great turning point in Münter's work: Here she found her very own style. The peculiar lighting conditions and the strong, glowing colors of the Lower Alpine landscape, the large, massive forms of the mountains acted as catalysts for the rapid development from post-Impressionism to Expressionism. In 1908 she created the painting "Der Blaue Berg" (Ketterer Kunst, auction 419, lot 312), a pioneering painting for Münter, which, in terms of color and landscape, is fundamental for our much more daring view of the Murnau mountains. Münter composed even more freely, even more detached from nature, throwing dark bordered, bright and pure color surfaces onto the unprimed cardboard, increasingly emancipating herself from the fundamental impression of nature with a poised brushstroke. She noted in her journal: "After a short time of agony I made a big leap - from copying nature - more or less impressionistic - to feeling a content - to abstraction - to rendering an extract." [EH/JS]