For Gabriele Münter, as for Wassily Kandinsky, the discovery of the area around the small Upper Bavarian town of Murnau in the foothills of the Alps meant a decisive turning point in her artistic development. In the fall of 1908, after years of constant travel and lengthy stays abroad, both had moved into a shared apartment on Ainmillerstrasse in Munich. Shortly before, they had visited Murnau for the first time and soon afterwards returned there for a joint study visit with Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin.
A diary entry by Münter from 1911 clearly reflects the feeling of liberation from years of artistic searching and the enthusiasm for a new beginning: "We had seen Murnau on an excursion and recommended it to Jawlensky and Werefkin - who also called us there in the autumn. We lived in the Griesbräu and we liked it very much. After a short period of torment I made a big leap - from copying nature - more or less impressionistic - to feeling a content, to abstracting - to giving an extract."
The small oil study by Jawlensky and Werefkin, which shows the painter couple lying down in a meadow, was created during a joint stay in Murnau in July 1909. It impressively demonstrates the change in Münter's work, the suddenly bold, uncompromising independence and the emphasis on reduced outline drawing compared to her previous painting studies based on nature, which were based on the tradition of late Impressionism. Radical simplification of form and clear, strong color contrasts characterize the picture. The figures are inserted into the dense, homogeneous green of the meadow slope and the equally dense blue of the sky and the mountains as simple basic forms, the faces barely indicated.
All the important elements are succinctly and accurately set in bold black contours using the Cloisonnism technique, which Alexej Jawlensky, who ultimately came from Paul Gauguin, had taught her. During this time, Münter maintained particularly close artistic contacts with Jawlensky in particular and, above all, incorporated his suggestions for a "synthesis" of the picture - a "consolidation" of the elements into a few characteristic forms - in her direct view of things, freed from everything irrelevant. In the first years in Murnau, Münter created a large number of important pictures with a new enthusiasm for work, which are an essential artistic contribution to the later movement of the 'Blauer Reiter'.
lenbachhaus
