Contours of a World
Guggenheim Museum
November 7, 2025–April 26, 2026
New York

A visit to Munich in early 1913 prompted the American painter Marsden Hartley to write his fellow artist Alfred Stieglitz back in New York. “The new German tendency is a force to be reckoned with,” Hartley reported excitedly, “to my own taste far more earnest and effective than the French intellectual movements.” It is impossible to say with certainty which artists in the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) circle—the nexus of Munich’s modernist fervor at the time—commanded his attention most intensely. Yet to look at Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914) or Painting No. 48 (1913) is to recognize the unmistakable echo of Gabriele Münter’s swatches of flattened color bounded by heavy black outlines. Asserting both the materiality of solid objects and load-bearing surfaces and, with the very same strokes, delighting in the pleasure of mere pigment as the agent of its own material world is the painter’s legacy.

The Guggenheim’s survey helps place Münter (1877–1962) back at the center of modernism’s early twentieth-century development—a role still frequently eclipsed by her erstwhile partnership to Wassily Kandinsky and his outsized legacy. While it possesses several dozen works by the latter, the museum owns only one canvas by Münter, the striking Snow-Covered Fir Tree (1933), duly included in the exhibition. Just as her artistic efforts pre-dated her relationship with Kandinsky, they outlasted its end. Curator Megan Fontanella goes some way in presenting the full breadth of Münter’s activity in Germany, where her career began and ended, and also Paris, Copenhagen, and the United States. The latter residency sparked notable photographic experiments at the century’s turn; examples on display here shed further light on a professional trajectory often obscured in its nuances and consequences.

Münter played prominent roles in the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (the city’s first prominent Expressionist organization) and its breakaway successor, Der Blaue Reiter. She served not merely as a painter, but as the uncredited photo editor of the group’s eponymous journal, a clearing house for a staggering range of avant-garde artists and critics both local and international. Though Hartley’s dismissal of “French movements” is somewhat subverted by the multinational cross-pollination that happened in the pages of this journal, his demotion of cold “intellect” in favor of a heartier “earnestness” underscores some undeniable dimensions of Münter and Kandinsky’s respective and influential experiments before World War I. Their visions bound up not only with landscape, but with lingering, late Romantic notions of intuition and inner experience. If Kandinsky would increasingly pare back the figurative and material vessels of the spirit, Münter kept hers doggedly rooted in what she called “the contours of a world.” Sunset over Staffelsee (ca. 1910) liberates the contours of its yellow clouds into a play of glowing bands and conflates the colors denoting water and mountain peak. Yet the stark silhouette of a lone island yanks those metaphysics back down to earth.

The proverbial “Murnau era” refers to the period before World War I when Münter—along with Kandinsky and the fellow artist-couple Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin—lived and painted in the Bavarian market town of Murnau am Staffelsee. The exhibition’s introductory selection of landscapes not only underscores the genre’s importance to Münter’s earliest work as a painter, but its enduring prominence, juxtaposing the large The Blue Gable (1911) next to Blue Lake (1954). The later painting not only echoes the earlier image’s electric blue, but reveals the reliably thick black lines with which the artist consistently organized her forms. In The Yellow House I (1911), those delineations frame a leafless tree, its trunk and branches plumb with the façade of a house, seemingly part of its very surface. A similar tree appears in the foreground of The Blue Gable, at once rising as a lone object and tessellating patches of color like stained glass.

Settling into thematic sections, the exhibition subdivides Münter’s corpus into landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, affording an in-depth look at her approach, but also strong-arming certain images into classifications they defy. Some of Münter’s titles have been taken too dutifully at their word. With its wonky green table, array of framed paintings, and pair of sculpted figures set in its right foreground, Still Life with X Beer (1914), for instance, forms more of a landscape than its title might suggest. If Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping) (ca. 1909–12) falls short of portraiture in its radical cropping of the figure’s body, the composition seems playfully and almost purposefully to flout its designation.