MURNAU Murnau, on the Staffelsee, lies on the railway line between Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen and is about 25 kilometres (15 miles) north of Garmisch. The original mediaeval town was largely destroyed by fire in the mid nineteenth century, but Murnau has become famous through its connection with the early twentieth century artistic movement known as Der Blaue Reiter. The movement was founded by Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and it was named after a painting by Kandinsky (The Blue Rider). The painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) became a student of Kandinsky in 1902 and soon became his common law wife (as Kandinsky was still married). She bought a house on the Staffelsee in Murnau. Münter and Kandinsky spent their summers there until the outbreak of war in 1914 which Kandinsky used as a pretext for ending the relationship. They were often joined by other members of their circle, including, Alex Jawlensky, August Marche, Franz Marc and others. These gatherings led to the foundation of the Blaue Reiter movement in 1911. Franz Marc moved to Kochel-am-See, not far away, in 1914. This group of artists were drawn to the region known as the Werdenfelser Land, because they found the landscape inspirational. It is a lovely region of mountains and lakes, partly alpine and partly sub-alpine, and including Murnau and Garmisch-Partenkirchen and stretching as far as Germany’s eastern border with Austria. It includes the					Kandinsky, Der Blaue Reiter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian-born painter and art commentator. In 1896 he moved to Munich to study painting. Six years later he joined the Berlin Secession, becoming a key figure in the Art Nouveau movement, and went on to travel across Western Europe and Africa. Kandinsky fused Art Nouveau with Russian folk art with Fauve-like colors, creating busy riots of shapes and strokes and stripes and splashes. Kandinsky's writing was also well received. The artist held German and French citizenship. He became, with Franz Marc the leader of the group of German Expressionist painters known as Der Blaue Reiter. He thought of colour harmony in painting as being analogous to harmony in music.
Karwendel and Wetterstein mountain ranges, of which the Zugspitze (Germany’s highest mountain) is a part. Murnau on the Staffelsee is in the sub-alpine region bordering these high mountain ranges slightly to their north. There are paintings of this landscape my Münter and by Kandinsky.
					The Staffelsee, with the Alps in the distance
Gabriele Münter in 1900					Gabriele Münter was born in Berlin in 1877. She attended the art school for ladies in Düsseldorf in 1897 and from 1898 to 1900, after the death of her parents she travelled in America, where she had relatives. She then moved to Munich and entered the Phalanx School led by Kandinsky. In 1903 they became engaged although Kandinsky was still married. They travelled in Europe and North Africa until 1908, when they estblished themselves in Munich. At this time their style was late impressionist. In 1909 Münter bought a house in Murnau and they lived there until 1914, when Kandinsky used the outbreak of war as a pretext for ending the relationship. While in Murnau they developed a new style of painting with the juxtaposition of bright colours, supression of realistic details, and the demarcation of forms with dark lines. In 1911 the movement known as Der Blaue Reiter was founded. The last meeting between Münter and Kandinsky was in Stokholm in 1916. From about 1920 Münter became depressed and this marks the end of her best work, although she continued to paint until the end of her life. She moved to Berlin, where she painted portraits of women, and then in 1929 went to Paris, where her creative impulse was renewed. During the Second World War she fiercely guarded a collection of Expressionist paintings which were regarded by the Nazis as degenerate. In 1957 the entire collection was transferred to the Städtische Galerie am Lenbachhaus in Munich. She died in 1962 in Munich at the age of 85.
The Münter-Haus in Murnau					Münter living with Kandinsky as his common law wife was more or less acceptable in the bohemian circles in which the pair moved. It was far from acceptable in the bourgeois society from which they both came, but they were sufficiently in love not to care. During their time together Kandinsky obtained a divorce, but they never married. When the relationship ended Kandinsky was to marry again twice. Münter continued to use the house in Murnau for some years, moving between Murnau, Munich and Cologne, until 1925, when she moved to Berlin. The paintings which Münter gave to the Städtische Galerie am Lenbachhaus in Munich is the largest collection of German Expressionist painting to be seen anywhere. The Münter-Haus in Murnau is now a museum where you can see a collection of furniture painted by Münter and Kandinsky and a staircase decorated by Kandinsky. There is also an exhibition on the Blue Rider Almanac, a collection of illustrated essays which was the manifesto of this avante-garde movement. There are several portraits of Kandinsky by Münter. Kandinsky was not a portrait painter but he did make one exception to this in painting the portrait of Gabriele reproduced below.
					Above: Kandinsky, Portrait of Gabriele Münter Left: Münter, Portrait of Wassily Kandinsky
Vassily Kandinsky		Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter Painting						Münter painting
Both artists painted views of Murnau as well as of the interior of their house. Those by Kandinsky tend to be more abstract and his work in general moved in the direction of greater abstraction. It would seem to be Münter who drew more direct inspiration from the landscape around Murnau. Kandinsky does not appear to have been very interested in painting mountains and lakes although he might use them as motifs in his paintings.					Kandinsky, My Dining Room
Münter, Kandinsky and Bossi at the Tble
Münter, Olympiastraße near Murnau							Münter, The Staffelsee
							Above: Munter, Murnau Left: Kandinsky, Church in Mutnau At a much later date Münter did adopt a more abstract style, but during her years in Murnau she did not follow Kandinsky to any great extent in this respect, although she did use simplified shapes and used dark lines to outline forms. She was quite assured in developing her own distinctive style. It is interesting to compare their paintings with photographs of Murnau and the srrounding landscape
											Three fairly similar photographs of Murnau. That on the far left was taken in 1930. The other two are quite recent.
Kandinsky, Murnau View with Railway and Castle							Kandinsky, Grungasse in Murnau
The Painting on the right would seem to be somewhere between Kandinsky’s impressionistic and his expressionistic styles. Münter’s painting of Murnau and its environs are more likely to be landscape paintings using natural forms such as the lake, clouds, mountains and trees as motifs and her palette tends to be very different from Kandinsky’s, invariably more subdued, except where there the influence of Gauguin is particularly obvious. Gauguin almost certainly influenced the development of German Expressionism very generally, but there are one or two paintings by Münter which are very clearly derivative. She would seem to be deliberately taking a different direction from Kandinsky in her use of colour.
					Münter, Towards Evening (Gegen Abend), 1909 This painting seems clearly to be an essay in the style of Paul Gauguin and is distint from her more usual style and palette as seen below, although this too is influenced by Gauguin several respects
Münter,Staffelsee with Sun through Fog
						Münter, Houses, Mountains and Clouds, 1910
Münter, Above the Staffelsee						A view from Murnau. The Murnau lanscape has a presence in this group of paintings by Münter in a way it does not in the Gauguin pastiche.
Kandinsky is really a very different painter from Münter. Their years working together in Murnau saw the development of the common stylistic elements which make them both German Expressionists. However the Russian folk element which is seen in Kandinsky’s early work has its counterpart in German Romanticism. This is a fantasy world of mediaeval legend and fairy tale. From this heritage come certain Leitmotifs which constantly recur in Kandinsky’s paintings through all his changes of style and are possibly a key to the world of his imagination. The most obvious of these is the horseback rider. The horseback rider starts out as a mediaeval knight in armour, he metamorphoses into the Blaue Reiter, streaking across the hillside his cape billowing, and he is still visible when Kandinsky’s work has become highly abstract. Finally he is replaced by the conception of painting as music, as colour harmony. The rider has						Kandinsky, Volga Song
vanished in abstraction but the minstrel’s song lingers on. The mediaeval town of Murnau was destroyed by fire but its landscape of forest, mountain and lake probably found an echo in Kandinsky’s imagination as the landscape of legend. The churches and houses and streets took on a vibrant life in his imagination. By contrast Münter’s vision was a relatively simple one. She responded to the landscape in a more direct way.
Kandinsky, The Forest				Kandinsky, Couple Riding						Kandinsky, The Blue Mountain
						Kandinsky, Study for Composition
Kandinsky, Improvisation: Rider
						Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, after Kandinsky and Münter had gone their separate ways, we find Münter becoming stylistically much closer to Kandinsky than she ever was when they lived together. The painting below, entitled Meditation, which Münter painted in 1917 (the year in which Kandinsky married again) is a powerfully original work even though it does owe a lot to Gauguin once again. The stroke of genius is turning Gauguin’s menacing plants into a stained glass window. The degree of abstraction is less than that which we find in Kandinsky, but it is quite sophisticated, playing with ambiguities, and her palette is remarkably similar to Kandinsky’s, except that Münter’s use of yellow is always sparing. No doubt she no longer felt the need to assert her artistic independence, indeed she very possibly wanted the opposite at this stage in her life, for emotional reasons. It took Gbriele Münter very many years to come to terms with their separation, and as this painting possibly suggests, this was a dark period in her personal life as well as being under the cloud of the First World War.
Kandinsky, Fugue
	Gabriele Münter, Meditation, 1917
Gabriele Munter, Jan 1957
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