Generalsvilla

During her years in Murnau, Gabriele Münter's artistic ambitions were primarily focused on landscape painting which provided the forum for her most daring painterly innovations. The present work is a powerful distillation of the lessons and influences she had absorbed during her time working with Kandinsky and Jawlensky in Murnau in 1908. The deliberately simplistic nature of the composition reflects Münter's interest in traditional Bavarian glass painting, whilst the heightened colouration and compressed spatial perspective indicate her familiarity with the work of the French Fauves. Münter transforms the landscape into irregular horizontal bands which seem to shimmer against each other as they interact, but also subjugates the landscape so that the composition is secondary to the contrasts and harmonies of her broad, flat areas of colour. Through this flatness and distillation of form, Münter sought to capture in her paintings not the mere representation of the scene as it appears to the viewer's eyes, but rather the spirituality of nature and the artist's own subjective emotions when confronted by it. For Münter, the depiction of a simple, dignified existence of a life led close to the land was assimilated into her conception of nature, which, in Richard Heller's analysis of her work, was 'a refuge, a place to which to escape from modern civilization, its turmoil, its social and political problems, its cities and industry, its materialism and its alienation' (R. Heller, Gabriele Münter. The Years of Expressionism, 1903-1920, Munich, 1997, p. 146). By placing the red house in Generalsvilla high on the horizon so that it contrasts sharply with the intense blue of the mountains, Münter creates an arrestingly powerful and vibrant depiction of the unity between humanity and nature.