Gabriele Münter - Häuser am Wald - image-1
Gabriele Münter - Häuser am Wald - image-2
Gabriele Münter - Häuser am Wald - image-1Gabriele Münter - Häuser am Wald - image-2

Lot 10 D

Gabriele Münter - Häuser am Wald

Auction 1211 - overview Cologne
02.12.2022, 18:00 - Evening Sale - Modern and Contemporary Art
Estimate: 300.000 € - 350.000 €
Result: 315.000 € (incl. premium)

Gabriele Münter

Häuser am Wald
1911

Oil on painting card, mounted on wooden board. 48.5 x 57 cm. Framed. Monogrammed signum and dated 'Mü. 11' in black lower right. Blue stamp "GABRIELE MÜNTER NACHLASS" verso. - Good, colour fresh condition in accordance with age. Two faint scratch marks in the area of the forest, professionally restored. A barely noticeable crease to upper right corner.

In 1909 Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky moved to the area outside Munich, to the town of Murnau am Staffelsee, where Münter would purchase a house. Alexei von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin followed them there.
This is where Münter created our landscape painting, which captivates us with the painter’s radicalism in liberating colour from the object. Houses, mountain and forest are abstracted into a bold shorthand. While the individual forms are layered in depth into a foreground, middle ground and background in the manner of a pictorial space, they exist autonomously within a framework of planes; the snow cap of the blue mountain can be read positively as well as negatively.
Münter found her way to this painterly freedom in the brief period of just two years with Kandinsky, Werefkin and Jawlensky at the so-called Russians’ House, where their living and working together had an extremely productive effect, resulting in expressive works of the highest quality, which have enriched the history of art and played a pioneering role for the art that followed.
Our painting was created in the founding year of the “Blaue Reiter” artists’ group, whose original members included Kandinsky and Münter, and it is from the best period of her oeuvre, before the outbreak of World War I tore everything apart and the world and art changed.
“In Murnau am Staffelsee, while working extremely energetically, [I found my way] to the manner of painting that suited me. I painted with […] Kandinsky, who slowly and logically developed on his own towards his early ideal – which he himself long found difficult to grasp – of an expression not restrained by the imitation of nature. From this point on, I no longer strove for the reconstructable, ‘correct’ form of things. And, nonetheless, I never wished to ‘overcome’ or shatter – much less ridicule – nature. I depicted the world the way it essentially appeared to me, how it took hold of me,” wrote Gabriele Münter about herself in 1948 (cited in: exh. cat. Bietigheim-Bissingen 1999, Gabriele Münter. Eine Malerin des Blauen Reiters, p. 17).

Provenance

Estate of Gabriele Münter; Galerie Aenne Abels, Cologne; private collection, Rhineland

Exhibitions

Cologne 1960/1961 (Galerie Aenne Abels), Gemälde von Gabriele Münter. Ausstellung 1908-1933, cat. no 14 (two labels to wooden board verso)