Gabriele Münter: Driven and Dedicated

Gabriel Münter - Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas - 1909 - Milwaukee Art Museum (click photo for larger image)German Expressionist artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was one of the founders in 1909 of the avant-garde artists’ group Neue Künstlervereinigung (“New Artists’ Association”) formed by Munich artists challenging the official art of the day. The artists in the group were united in their purpose, not in their style. In 1911 Münter joined Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) in leaving the group to form the rival association, Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), the second phase of German Expressionism, which reached its peak in Berlin, during the 1920s.

A student of Kandinsky, Münter fell in love with the painter and lived with him for more than a decade, during the period leading up to WWI. Münter exhibited paintings at the Blaue Reiter exhibitions of 1911 and 1912. While sharing the group’s characteristic intensity of color and expressiveness of line, her still life paintings, figures, and landscapes remained uniquely representational rather than abstract. The painting featured here is one of her more notable works.