Gabriele Munter

The mark of a major artist is the contribution, legacy and influence of his or her’s oeuvre on a time and place, which lives on after the artist has departed. For the German Expressionists, in particular, the Blaue Reiter group, the major artists were Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawelsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter. Credit for the establishment of the group is almost always given to Marc and Kandinsky, since they were the editors of the Blaue Reiter almanac and the name of the group was derived both from a love of horses on Marc’s part, Kandinsky’s affinity for riders and a shared love for the color blue, which represented spirituality. The Blaue Reiter group and the New Artists Society, as they were established, stood in opposition to the conventional nature of the academic art world and decadent society as a whole in Germany in the early 1900s, and sought to bring abstraction and Expressionism to the forefront. The theosophical and symbolist influences drove the artists in this collective to examine divine truths through art, while experimenting with various painting techniques and mediums. Although this group lacked an artistic manifesto, Kandinsky outlined the objectives for artists in this group in his essay, The Struggle for Art, published in 1911.  In it, Kandinsky points to six major characteristics of the duty of an artist:
Man,…consists of two elements: the internal and the external.
The interior element of a man, or the inner person, remains in continuous contact with the internal aspect of the world that surrounds him. This contact is inescapable.
The complete harmony of the work of art is therefore the ultimate balance between the internal and the external, i.e, between content and form.
The connection between the work of art and the artist impresses upon the former a stamp of the artist’s personality, his style.
Thus, in every work of art, two styles are to be found: that of the “individual” and that of the “school.”
Since our inner life (like any visible form of life) is ordered according to plan and purpose, the expression of this life demands a planned and purposeful form.
Thus, even today, the absolute necessity in art of plan and purpose, i.e, of construction—is quite clear. Every contemporary artist must inevitably make his creation meet this requirement.

Despite the fact that Kandinsky identified the artist as a man, I seek to argue that Münter expressed these edicts to the fullest capacity throughout the course of her long career and for that, her rank within this group should be elevated.

Eine Einführung in die gleichnamige Ausstellung. Auf ca. 40 Seiten stellt die Publikation die wichtigsten Arbeiten der gleichnamigen Ausstellung vor und legt die künstlerischen und gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhänge dar.
Herausgegeben von der Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Text: Laura Heeg und Max Holicki, Bramsche 2015.

The author refers to works by, e.g. Shari Benstock (Women of the Left Bank) and Cristanne Miller (Cultures of Modernism) to describe Berlin in the first decades of the twentieth century from a gender perspective and look at the opportunities that this metropolis offered to its women-settlers, who searched for their space of personal and artistic freedom. While Benstock describes the constellation of women in Paris, which consisted of such modernists as Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach or Edith Wharton, the author sheds light on a network of connections of Eleonore Kalkowska, a Polish-German writer, who shortly before the Great War started attending Max Reinhardt’s acting school, and after 1918 decided to settle in Berlin and in the late 1920s managed to succeed, e.g. in the avant-garde Zeittheater movement. This article presents Kalkowska’s relations with the artistic milieu of female painters and sculptors associated with the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen [Assosciation of Berlin Female Artists] and also efforts of “New Women” (as emancipated, ambitious, professionally active women were called since the turn of the centuries – see, e.g. Sally Ledger, The New Woman. Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle) to create institutions and media of self-representation, which shaped the women’s metropolis until 1933.