{"id":302149,"date":"2025-11-22T20:39:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T20:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/302149\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T20:39:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T20:39:13","slug":"at-the-guggenheim-a-gabriele-munter-finally-gets-her-due","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/302149\/","title":{"rendered":"At the Guggenheim, a Gabriele M\u00fcnter Finally Gets Her Due"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrived at the Guggenheim for \u201cContours of a World,\u201d<\/a> the new show devoted to the late German artist Gabriele M\u00fcnter, with what I thought was a deep appreciation of, and pretty solid familiarity with, her work. I was quickly proven wrong.<\/p>\n

The first gallery I stepped into was full of black-and-white photographs; until then, I had only known M\u00fcnter to paint. \u201cShe picked up a camera before she even picked up a brush,\u201d says Guggenheim curator Megan Fontanella; the Guggenheim\u2019s survey marks the first time her photographs have been exhibited in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cContours of a World\u201d also examines another overlooked force within M\u00fcnter\u2019s practice. Though she is closely associated with German Expressionism\u2014even if her work was long overshadowed by her relationship with Wassily Kandinsky\u2014in her early adulthood, M\u00fcnter and her family spent significant time in America. Between 1898 and 1900, she traveled with her sister through Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas, using birthday money to buy herself a No. 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak camera to chronicle what her 23-year-old eyes saw.<\/p>\n

She was a keen and curious observer from the start, and one who understood how to play with composition. One photograph shows a young girl in a stiff pinafore, her hair twisted into ringlets and head tilted away from the sun. (One of the long shadows cast around her clearly belongs to M\u00fcnter, the subtle incorporation of the artist into the frame somewhat reminiscent of Vivian Maier.) In another, called \u201cThree Women,\u201d M\u00fcnter captures three elegantly dressed Black women bookended by white children who stare as they stride through the town of Marshall, Texas for the Emancipation Day Festival on June 19, 1900\u2014a day that has come to be known as Juneteenth. M\u00fcnter would write to her brother back in Germany that she \u201cwas snapping as if her body and soul depended on it,\u201d clearly understanding that she was bearing witness to something vitally important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I arrived at the Guggenheim for \u201cContours of a World,\u201d the new show devoted to the late German…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134,20991,9778,1672],"class_list":{"0":"post-302149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-splitscreenimagerightinset","16":"tag-storytypereporting","17":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}