(Berlin 1877 - 1962 Murnau)

Vereiste Strasse. 1911.

Oil on board.

On the reverse with the estate stamp.

34.9 x 40.5 cm.

This work will be included in the Catalogue raisonné of paintings by Gabriele Münter, published by the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation.

Provenance:
- Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich.
- Private collection, Germany (bought in the 70s at the gallery above).

After the early death of her parents, her first private drawing classes in Dusseldorf, and a two-year stay in America, Gabriele Münter moved to Munich in 1901. As it was forbidden at that time for women to study at a public art academy, the young emancipated woman first entered the school of the association of female artists (Künstlerinnen-Verein) and later a private art school called the “Phalanx”, where Kandinsky was first her teacher and, a short time later, her lover. Münter and Kandinsky travelled to many different places and their painterly style was strongly influenced by their nascent relationship with the Fauves. In her journal Münter wrote: “Ich habe da nach kurzer Zeit der Qual einen großen Sprung gemacht – vom Naturabmalen – mehr oder weniger impressionistisch – zum Fühlen des Inhaltes, zum Abstrahieren – zum Geben des Extraktes.” (A. Hoberg (Ed.), Wassily Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter in Murnau und Kochel, 1902-1914. Briefe und Erinnerungen, Munich 1994, pp. 45f.)

Landscape played a central role in Münter’s work, is one of the artist’s most popular subjects, and was also her personal favourite. She covered the most varied range of landscapes, experimented with colours, light and types of weather, and so created a palette of the most diverse works. In her painting Münter concentrated on sharp forms and contours, ignoring the detail and reducing the landscape to its essential simplicity. The paintings consist of colour planes, which interact harmoniously. They depict concrete, yet abstracted landscapes. The flat compositions, the absence of shadow, and the framing of individual planes are Münter‘s stylistic devices, in which the present painting is unequalled. The central barren tree is a motif which Münter made use of in several works. In “Vereiste Strasse” she places the trunk in the centre of the picture. The leafless branches rise up in the red sky. The snow lies on the meadow and is punctuated with isolated patches of green grass, not yet or no longer covered in snow. The title of the painting is evident from the icy blue of the street. Our painting “Vereiste Straße” from 1911 was produced within the context of a series of winter pictures (paintings and drawings) from the winter of 1910/1911, which with the sparing quality of the pictorial material and dominance of the line, mark a change in style, which is clearly distinct from the pictures of 1910 with their contoured areas of colour. The contour line seems to have become independent, and to have taken control of the picture. In this painting the dark outer line still marks the contours of the colour areas, but the line frees itself from this role and gains autonomy as a graphic element. “Whoever looks carefully at my paintings, there they will find the draughtsman” wrote Gabriele Münter looking back in 1952. What is notable in this composition is how Münter succeeded in causing the corporeality of the areas of colour to recede and the lines, with their graphic function, to come to the fore. In this way, individual pictorial motifs are established as stable components of her pictures.

Together with other important Expressionist painters such as Franz Marc and of course Kandinsky, she is one of the founding members of the Munich Blaue Reiter group. Although Münter was at the centre of the Blaue Reiter, she never took up the development towards abstraction, but remained within a painting style which is abstracted, but still figurative. In December 1911 the first Blaue Reiter exhibition (“Die erste Ausstellung der Redaktion der Blauen Reiter”) opened, showing around 43 works by 14 artists, of which 5 were by Münter. The painting presented at auction here was produced in the same year. A second, somewhat larger example, was part of this unique exhibition and thereby underlines the importance of our “Vereiste Strasse”.