Münter & Kandinsky

At the beginning of the 20th century, the native Berliner Gabriele Münter lives and paints together with her great love, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, in Murnau am Staffelsee in Bavaria. This province becomes the starting point for an artistic breakthrough into modernity, revolutionizing painting and the understanding of art, and giving rise to the artist movement Der Blaue Reiter.

Alice Brauner and Heike Gronemeier vividly depict the life and love story of Münter and Kandinsky: the young painting student who falls in love with her eleven years older teacher. Their shared life of travel and in the Blue Land becomes the source of inspiration for their painting, making them pioneers of their time alongside Werefkin, Jawlensky, Marc, and Macke. Their artistically productive yet privately disastrous connection plunges Münter into depression and a creative crisis for a time, before she manages to free herself from the shadow of her mentor and lover.

The authors succeed not only in allowing readers to partake in the intoxication of the abruptly ending spirit of adventure in 1914 but also in casting the relationship of the two artists in a new light: one could only become what he was through the other. Just as life and art of Gabriele Münter cannot be represented without Wassily Kandinsky, so too is his story and that of the new artist movements inconceivable without her. With numerous black-and-white photographs and a color image section.