Gabriele Münter, Vor der Kirche, 1931

Lot description

Signed and dated 'Münter 1931' in black lower left. The painting “Vor der Kirche” belongs to the outstanding works from the early 1930s, the period when Gabriele Münter moved back to Murnau with her new partner Johannes Eichner and revisited the expressionist tradition of “Der Blaue Reiter”. The Münter expert Annegret Hoberg writes: “the paintings she was now producing in great numbers reflect her recovery of creative enjoyment and compositional power and build on the expressionist style from the period before the war, except that the forms are now softer, more cohesive and less expressive. Once again it is bold, often darkly luminous colours that […] are framed within dark contours” (Annegret Hoberg, Gabriele Münter, Cologne 2017, p. 84). Münter has chosen the simple architecture of a white church with a small adjoining structure as the primary motif of her landscape painting. She has framed this motif using the shrubs next to it as well as two large trees: the one on the left is striking and is adorned with yellow foliage. Münter has inserted a woman equipped with a farmer’s rake and her daughter into the foreground of the scene as a living motif, placing them on a broad path partially covered with leaves. As in the time of “Der Blaue Reiter”, Münter has also relied on large, homogeneous fields of green, blue, brown and yellow in “Vor der Kirche”. The black contours that Münter has employed to surround the fields of colour are another stylistic device that is realised here and comes from the period of “Der Blaue Reiter”. Like other comparable paintings from this period, this work reflects the power of intense and thoroughly vivid colours based on a foundation of energetic drawing.