Lot 239 D

Still lifes, particularly floral still lifes, present a major and central subject in Gabriele Münter's oeuvre. The arrangement, style and colours of the individual compositions testify to this subject's potential in connection with modern painting - re-explored on the basis of the "Blauer Reiter", moving far beyond botany and traditional studies from nature. Münter indubitably came across the wellsprings of human creativity and the basic need for decoration through her own collection of folk art and reverse-glass paintings, which she copied and paraphrased. Like her other painter friends, she also experienced these objects in terms of the authentic products of form-giving processes, studying them with interest and, above all, seeing them with fresh eyes. These products came to provide a model, comparable to a secret matrix underlying her own art (see comparative illus.).
In her late work of the 1950s Münter often conceived her floral still lifes as so-called "coloured drawings" in oil on paper, distributing ever-changing variations of semi-abstract flower forms in expansive compositions on a white ground (see Annegret Hoberg/Helmut Friedel, Gabriele Münter, Retrospektive, exhib. cat., Lenbachhaus, Munich 1992, cat. no. 248, p. 296). Emphasising the contours she simultaneously concentrates and separates the forms, underscores the bouquets' potential abundance in up to seven different kinds of flowers and, at the same time, limits her palette to clear complementary colours which shine out towards viewers. It is well known that she was in the habit of also personally copying particularly successful examples of her work. Her pen-and-ink drawings of this period also display an intense occupation with complex and concentrated floral still lifes. The very free and vibrant composition of the present sheet is compelling not least through the symmetrical echoes of the arrangement. Through its artificiality and her art, Münter brings the unruliness of a - so to speak - "natural" grouping into a harmonious balance without losing the power of its direct expression.


Comparative illustration: „Bayerisches Spiegelbild St. Martin", frontispiece in the almanac „Der Blaue Reiter"
Gabriele Münter, Der heilige Martin und der Bettler, watercolour from a mirror image, 1911/1912
From: Brigitte Salmen (ed.), Der Almanach „Der Blaue Reiter", Bilder und Bildwerke in Originalen, exhib. cat. Schloßmuseum Murnau 1998, p. 90 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018