{"id":594489,"date":"2026-04-10T09:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T09:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/594489\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T09:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T09:34:14","slug":"its-gabriele-munters-world-were-just-living-in-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/594489\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Gabriele M\u00fcnter\u2019s World, We\u2019re Just Living in It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art Review<\/a><\/p>\n

It is her home, her landscape, her family and friends, portrayed in these images that feel miles away from her contemporaries\u2019 modernist abstraction.<\/p>\n


\n \"Natalie
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Gabriele M\u00fcnter, “Portrait of Mrs. Olga von Hartmann\u201d (c. 1910\u201311), oil on board (all photos Natalie Haddad\/Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)<\/p>\n

When a woman artist is among a milieu of more successful men, the comments often go like this: \u201cShe\u2019s just as good as them.\u201d Or, for an artist couple, \u201cshe was his inspiration.\u201d Gabriele M\u00fcnter, the Berlin-born modernist who co-founded the German Expressionist group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) in 1911, isn\u2019t exactly overlooked; she\u2019s had multiple institutional surveys, and her former home in Murnau, Germany, is now a museum<\/a>. Yet in the United States, she lacks the name recognition of her male contemporaries, in particular her partner of 10 years, Wassily Kandinsky.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, Kandinsky is a phantom presence in the Guggenheim\u2019s current M\u00fcnter retrospective, Contours of a World<\/a>. Not only is he in some of her paintings, but the museum\u2019s founding collection includes over 150 of his works and only one of hers \u2014 a gift, not a purchase. We can chalk that up to a single, powerful person who overlooked her: Solomon R. Guggenheim.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Left: Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cAnnie (Scheuber) Smith with young girl [probably Allie May Smith], Mary (Bruce Scheuber) Allen, and Jerusha Allen, Marshall, Texas\u201d (July 1900, printed 2006\/7), gelatin silver print; right: Gabriele M\u00fcnter, “Still Life with Madonna\u201d (1911), oil on board<\/p>\n

This line of thought crossed my mind when I visited Contours of a World, a beautiful tour through M\u00fcnter\u2019s creative life installed in the museum\u2019s fourth- and fifth-floor side galleries rather than its majestic ramp. I heard at least one \u201cshe\u2019s as good as them\u201d while I was there. I\u2019d counter that she more than equaled her celebrated counterparts. As a driving force of The Blue Rider, her timeless talent arguably surmounted the other members\u2019 formal innovations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The title comes from M\u00fcnter\u2019s explanation of her process (quoted in the wall texts): \u201cThe forms gather in outlines, the colors become fields, and contours \u2014 images \u2014 of the world emerge.\u201d And it is her world: her home, her landscape, her family and friends, portrayed in figurative images that can feel miles away from her contemporaries\u2019 modernist abstraction. What she accomplished is more radical than the subject matter suggests. M\u00fcnter\u2019s art is a masterclass in the phenomenological experience of seeing. Her images are windows into a scene, but her visual strategies redefine the static act of viewing art as something dynamic, as if her world is moving around us, demanding our perception to focus and refocus.<\/p>\n

\"\"Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cBreakfast of the Birds\u201d (1934), oil on board<\/p>\n

That act of viewing structures the gorgeous \u201cBreakfast of the Birds\u201d (1934). A figure seen from behind (probably the artist) sits at a table in front of a window that looks out onto a wintry, bird-lined tree. The sitter is a version of the R\u00fcckenfigur, a stand-in for the spectator. The device was made famous by Caspar David Friedrich, who wanted audiences to contemplate the sublime vistas he recorded. M\u00fcnter trades Friedrich\u2019s grandeur for intimacy and warmth; we\u2019re contemplating a table with what I like to think is tea and a slice of gugelhupf<\/a>, and a glimpse of nature dominated by resting birds on a spindly tree. Diverging from Romanticism\u2019s open space and dramatic lighting, she creates depth by layering elements: The centered figure sits lowest in the pictorial space, in front of the table, followed by the wall and then the tree. The composition positions the museum-goer as another element in the sequence, while curtains framing the window evoke a theatrical stage, as if we\u2019re watching a play.<\/p>\n

\"\"Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cSnowy Landscape with a Red-Roofed House\u201d (1935), painting on canvas<\/p>\n

M\u00fcnter\u2019s landscapes can be more dizzying. \u201cHouse with Fir Trees in the Snow\u201d (c. 1938) crowds vertical elements \u2014 thin trees in the top half, two posts bookending two boulders at the bottom \u2014 into a vertical canvas. A house just below the center sits on a slightly diagonal horizon line. Its gabled roof reflects the shape of both the boulders and the white lines of snow on the trees. The whole feels vertiginous, as if M\u00fcnter is stretching our gaze upward, while the boulders have a R\u00fcckenfigur effect, heightened by the house\u2019s windows that look back at us like eyes. Another winter scene, \u201cSnowy Landscape with a Red-Roofed House\u201d (1935), seems like it\u2019s about to slip off the canvas, its curving diagonal lines cutting through the snow and rushing out toward us. Meanwhile, the showstopper \u201cLiving Room in Murnau (Interieur)\u201d (1910) turns an unoccupied room into a cacophony of saturated lime green and ocher, sharp angles, and bold diagonal lines; on the far left, a figure \u2014 Kandinsky \u2014 reclines in the flattened space of an improbably small bedroom. It all somehow feels both small and large. (I\u2019ve been there and my memory of it is as skewed as the painting\u2019s geometry.) Looking at the image made me feel like I was in motion.<\/p>\n

\"\"Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cLiving Room in Murnau (Interieur)\u201d (1910)<\/p>\n

M\u00fcnter\u2019s colors are spectacular \u2014 vibrant, contrasting, some so luscious you could almost eat them. (The crimson coat in \u201cPortrait of a Young Woman in a Large Hat\u201d from 1909 is practically visceral.) For this reason, her art is often compared with that of the Fauves<\/a> and the Nabis, and a year spent in France when she was 20 (1907\u20138) certainly influenced her aesthetic. However, a gallery of her black and white photographs predating the paintings, from a two-year visit to the United States (1898\u20131900), bear out the visual logic of her later work. The photographs and paintings share the artist\u2019s attention to contrasting tones and dynamic compositions. More significantly, the immediacy of photography grounded M\u00fcnter\u2019s artistic maturation in active perception, as opposed to the stillness of painting. Embodied sight is embedded in her creative vision.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Letter\u201d (1930) is among the show\u2019s subtler works, rendered in soft floral hues, but it fuses photography\u2019s time-based principles and painting\u2019s image-based ones into an exceptionally elegant whole. The layered composition depicts a reading woman in a chair, turned away from us, adjacent to another woman lying in bed with her head propped up, facing us; behind them, we see a grass-green wall and white curtains moving with the breeze from an open window. The motion of nature and people, oceanic color, shifting focal points, and fluid brushwork cohere into a moment in time, soon past. It is a graceful testament to M\u00fcnter\u2019s brilliance, and an invitation into her world.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cThe Letter\u201d (1930), painting on canvas\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Left: Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cPortrait of a Young Woman in a Large Hat\u201d (1909); right: Gabriele M\u00fcnter, \u201cHouse with Fir Trees in the Snow\u201d (c. 1938), oil on board<\/p>\n

\"\"Gabriele M\u00fcnter, “The Yellow House I” (1911), oil on canvas\"\"Installation view of Gabriele M\u00fcnter: Contours of a World (\u00a9 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, photo Ben Hider, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)<\/p>\n

Gabriele M\u00fcnter: Contours of a World<\/a> continues at the Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through April 26. The exhibition was curated by Megan Fontanella; the photography section was curated by Victoria Horrocks.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Review It is her home, her landscape, her family and friends, portrayed in these images that feel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-594489","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-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}