Lot 13 | Gabriele Münter | Mit roter Sonne

Tradition and avant-garde

Gabriele Münter, born in Berlin in 1877, is one of the outstanding protagonists of German Expressionism, along with Paula Modersohn-Becker and Marianne von Werefkin. As a co-founder of the artists' group “Der Blaue Reiter”, she made a breakthrough in a new, spontaneous style of painting. Münter's works are characterised by strong, bright colours, simplified forms and an intense, emotional pictorial language that reflects the influence of folk art and her engagement with nature. Her painting combines tradition and avant-garde. As a student and partner of Wassily Kandinsky, she played a central role in the development of modern art in Germany and continues to have a lasting influence on European art history to this day.

With Red Sun

In Murnau am Staffelsee, where Gabriele Münter lived until her death in 1962, numerous paintings and watercolours were created. Most of them are landscape motifs and still lifes. The landscape watercolour ‘Mit roter Sonne’ (With Red Sun) probably shows Lake Staffelsee with the rising morning sun in white wafts of mist. The foreground of this atmospheric landscape painting is characterised by green meadows and two solitary trees that harmoniously frame the motif on both sides. In the centre of the picture lies the lake, whose colour is reflected in the depiction of the mountain range, the typical cone-shaped mountains for Münter, on the horizon. In between, there are gently rolling brown hills that flow rhythmically into one another. The glowing red sun, surrounded by light clouds of mist, forms an exciting accent in the overall composition. The thinly applied areas of colour are outlined in dark contours, which Münter lets merge into one another in a rhythmically staggered manner or sets off against one another, thus largely eliminating the spatial effect. The deliberate omission of the painting ground, which shimmers through in a beige colour, makes it an essential part of the work and creates a certain lightness and transparency.

A companion piece to the work offered is the painting ‘Staffelsee mit Nebelsonne’ from 1931, which shows strong compositional similarities (Fig. 1). In contrast to this, however, ‘Mit roter Sonne’ excitingly points to a lack of human or animal existence. Only nature itself is exposed to its own forces here, which seems incredibly mysterious to the viewer. In a subtle way, Münter impressively describes the primitiveness of life and the associated everlasting cycle of becoming and decaying. Thus, Münter not only describes the pure atmosphere of a foggy day in the mountains, but also her subjective perception in the face of what she has found.