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Lot Essay
'"You have probably understood that I have always been mainly a plein air painter", Gabriele Mnter told Edouard Roditi during her interview with him in 1958, when she found herself painting less and less, "although I have also painted portraits and still-life compositions". Landscapes were her favourite motif... "Still life is the piano - landscape - the orchestra", she wrote in her diary in December 1941... Only to the landscape did she turn with joy, no matter what the circumstances of her life were. In it, she found release"' (R. Heller, Gabriele Mnter. The Years of Expressionism, 1903-1920, Munich, 1997, p. 127).
In his most recent work on Mnter, Heller provides a brilliant analysis of the artist's rapport with the pictorial genre which became the perpetual site of her experimentation and innovation - landscape. Since her early journey to America, Mnter developed a profound interest in landscapes, which she drew, painted and photographed with an exceptionally observant eye. This she retained when she returned to Germany in 1900, and continued to refine it at the Munich Ladies' Academy and the Phalanx School. It was the countryside that featured so prominently in her first oil paintings at Kallmnz, 'and it was in landscape motifs that she integrated radical innovations into her work executed in Murnau... Her most important artistic aspirations are concentrated in her landscapes" (ibidem, p. 127). Deeply indebted to the tradition of German Romanticism, whilst also contributing to the revolutionary debate of the Blaue Reiter, Mnter conceived nature as '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' (ibidem, p. 146). According to the utopian view of the German artistic intelligentsia of the beginning of the century, the function of landscape painting was to restore the unity between humanity and nature, cancelled by modern civilisation. Nature was to be experienced with a new, intense and elemental approach, and the artist was called to demonstrate 'a profound involvement with the external world of nature and objects. These become personalised by means of powerful, a-naturalistic and anti-naturalistic presentations of colors and forms in an effort to revitalise the subject/object relationship that was thought to have become cool, neutral and distanced' (ibidem, p. 146).
For Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Werefkin and, above all, Mnter, Murnau, with its coexistence of the monumental Alps - which in the late 18th and 19th Century came to embody the Romantic sublime - and the Bavarian countryside, became the real 'laboratory' of the group's experiments. Mnter, in particular, 'presented the village and its alpine environs as paradigms of human life lived in constant interaction with nature, sometimes harmonious, sometimes struggling. A human presence in the landscape, even when figures are absent, was a constant motif employed by Mnter' (ibidem, p. 146).
These early Murnau pictures perfectly illustrate Mnter's obsession with chromatics and composition: like her partner Kandinsky, Mnter's primary aims were to infuse her oils with the enamelled colours which reflected her artistic eye rather than the colours of the landscape and to impose upon her subject a structure which made the perspective of her composition secondary to the relationships between these flat, broad planes of bright colour.
Mnter's endless pictorial research on nature is further exemplified by the series of Scandinavian landscapes which follow (lots 26, 28 and 29). This grouping of paintings all share the prestigious provenance of Zwei Häuser mit Holzzaun which was acquired by the family of the present owner in 1923 directly from the artist, a close friend since her early journey to Sweden in 1917.
In his most recent work on Mnter, Heller provides a brilliant analysis of the artist's rapport with the pictorial genre which became the perpetual site of her experimentation and innovation - landscape. Since her early journey to America, Mnter developed a profound interest in landscapes, which she drew, painted and photographed with an exceptionally observant eye. This she retained when she returned to Germany in 1900, and continued to refine it at the Munich Ladies' Academy and the Phalanx School. It was the countryside that featured so prominently in her first oil paintings at Kallmnz, 'and it was in landscape motifs that she integrated radical innovations into her work executed in Murnau... Her most important artistic aspirations are concentrated in her landscapes" (ibidem, p. 127). Deeply indebted to the tradition of German Romanticism, whilst also contributing to the revolutionary debate of the Blaue Reiter, Mnter conceived nature as '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' (ibidem, p. 146). According to the utopian view of the German artistic intelligentsia of the beginning of the century, the function of landscape painting was to restore the unity between humanity and nature, cancelled by modern civilisation. Nature was to be experienced with a new, intense and elemental approach, and the artist was called to demonstrate 'a profound involvement with the external world of nature and objects. These become personalised by means of powerful, a-naturalistic and anti-naturalistic presentations of colors and forms in an effort to revitalise the subject/object relationship that was thought to have become cool, neutral and distanced' (ibidem, p. 146).
For Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Werefkin and, above all, Mnter, Murnau, with its coexistence of the monumental Alps - which in the late 18th and 19th Century came to embody the Romantic sublime - and the Bavarian countryside, became the real 'laboratory' of the group's experiments. Mnter, in particular, 'presented the village and its alpine environs as paradigms of human life lived in constant interaction with nature, sometimes harmonious, sometimes struggling. A human presence in the landscape, even when figures are absent, was a constant motif employed by Mnter' (ibidem, p. 146).
These early Murnau pictures perfectly illustrate Mnter's obsession with chromatics and composition: like her partner Kandinsky, Mnter's primary aims were to infuse her oils with the enamelled colours which reflected her artistic eye rather than the colours of the landscape and to impose upon her subject a structure which made the perspective of her composition secondary to the relationships between these flat, broad planes of bright colour.
Mnter's endless pictorial research on nature is further exemplified by the series of Scandinavian landscapes which follow (lots 26, 28 and 29). This grouping of paintings all share the prestigious provenance of Zwei Häuser mit Holzzaun which was acquired by the family of the present owner in 1923 directly from the artist, a close friend since her early journey to Sweden in 1917.