Gabriele Munter

I'm sure that I must have heard of Gabriele Munter before, but like most people have probably found her memory and work overshadowed by her male contemporaries, especially her lover Wassily Kandinsky So here's to redressing that imbalance.Gabriele Munter was born in 1887 to upper middle class parents, who unusually for the time encouraged her to become an artist; in her youth she was also a talented pianist. As a woman she wasn't allowed to enroll in the German Academy, but didn't feel challenged by the Woman's Artist School. By twenty-two both her parents had died, she and her sister were both left enough to live independently and  in 1898 decided to visit their extended family in America, which gave her social experience unusual for women in the early 1900s.
On returning to Germany she began taking classes at the Munich's progressive new Phalanx School, whose director was the Russian artist Kandinsky. Not only did he encourage her work, but they also had a relationship, until separated by the First World War in 1914 when he returned to Russia and she went to Switzerland.
She was dedicated to German Expressionism, a movement influenced by Nietzsche rebelling against the materialism of German imperialist and bourgeois society. In 1911 Kandinsky, Munter and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider)  movement, sharing a common desire to express spiritual truths through art, seeing  spiritual meanings in colour, and championing the connection between music and visual art. (Quite some time ago now, my son's dissertation for Music A level was on this connection and I joined him during this time in studying at length both Kandinsky and Klee)
Munter and Kandinsky travelled extensively around Europe and North Africa, meeting Rousseau and Matisse.   She was also influenced by  Fauvism, plus Van Gogh and Gauguin, and living in the small Bavarian market town of Murnau, a place untouched by industrialization and technology, when her landscapes became imaginative and rich in fantasy, with  blues, pinks and yellows. She was searching for a lost balance between humanity and nature. Munter used simplified forms, expressive lines and flat bold colours to communicate feelings; her paintings have their own identity and mood, a distinctive visual personality.

While male artists tend to use lovers and muses to paint, like many female artists Munter painted several self-portraits. What I love about Munter's face is that she reminds me of Emily Watson, one of my favourite actors, and like her she seems to have humanity and yet sadness in her expressions.