Gabriele Münter in Paris

At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris for an exhibition of the works of German expressionist artist Gabriele Münter.

Gabriele Münter met Wassily Kandinsky in Munich in 1902 when she enrolled in Kandinsky’s art class at the Phalanx artists association that he had set up with other artist friends. By the following year they had become a couple and they travelled extensively and worked together until they eventually settled back in Munich in 1908. In Munich they met Russian artists Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, a couple who had met at St. Petersburg Academy of Art. In the summer of 1908, the four of them left Munich for a stay in the countryside in the small town of Murnau, where they worked together and developed a new expressive style of painting.

In January 1909, the four artists, together with others, founded an association they called the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists Association Munich). The Association held annual exhibitions at Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, although the critics’ reviews were scathing. In 1910, at the second exhibition, Franz Marc publicly gave his support and this led to him joining the group and Kandinsky and Marc soon became close allies. However, tensions within the Association eventually proved irreconcilable when, in December 1911, the jury of the group’s third exhibition rejected Kandinsky’s abstract painting ‘Composition V’. Kandinsky, Marc, and Münter resigned from the Association and organized their own show, the first exhibition of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’.

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris exhibition is the first retrospective in France devoted to Münter’s work. It shows around 170 works, including paintings, engravings, photographs and embroidered designs. It provides a detailed chronological journey through more than sixty years of her work and its importance for the history of twentieth-century art.