Portrait of Gabriele Münter

Portrait of Gabriele Münter, 1905, Oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm. 

In the years from the turn of the century til this work was done, Kandinsky had been experimenting with a variety styles and techniques, principally of landscape, but also of folkish/ fairytale scenes. We clearly see pointillist, even divisionist methods of painting, together with Post-Impressionist and Symbolist use of extended blobs and strokes of paint. Holland – Beach Chairs (1904) is an example: 

It tends more toward the  abstract in its use of discrete colour strokes in the foreground, leaving bare canvas between, but in both technique and subject I’d say it’s pretty typical. In these years, Kandinsky is trying out different techniques of painting, drawn from different art movements of the late 19th and turn of the century. His move to a fairly abstract-looking manner – still clearly anchored in recognizable motifs and format - seems to have been quite quick and purposeful, which makes his portrait of Münter unusual in relation to other works done in 1905. 

In 1900 Kandinsky had organized the Phalanx exhibition association and from that, an art school with the same name. It was in that school that he met and developed a relationship with a student, Gabriele Münter. As their affair developed, he explained that his relationship with his wife, Ania, had been falling apart, that they were interested in different things, and he’d considered leaving her even before they met. That old chestnut. Anyway, by 1905, he jettisoned much of the progressive style and techniques he’d been exploring in order to do this very conventional painting. 

Traditional portraiture was very much at odds with his priorities as an artist, and I can only think this work had more to do with his feelings for the woman and her physical appearance than anything relating to ‘art’ more generally. At the time, he called it a ‘lousy painting.’ Indeed, perhaps Kandinsky hadn’t seen enough models for thinking the historical form of a head-and-shoulders portrait in a modernist style? They existed in the work of Van Gogh, for example, but he’d not yet seen Matisse’s Green Stripe, completed the same year but to radically different ends. (https://www.henrimatisse.org/green-stripe.jsp) Whatever the reasons, this is the painting he did, and it’s quite old-fashioned and at odds with everything else he was doing at the time. 

Of course, it’s not an academic painting. Brush strokes far too visible, background too vague, lack of historical context. It learns its technique from Impressionism, its loose, visible brushwork a rejection of naturalism and an opening to the terms on which immediate perception takes place. I think the vacuous space in which the subject is depicted owes much to Jugendstil portraiture and possibly his previous teacher, Franz Stuck in particular. But there are many possible sources. 

She is situated centrally in the painting, balanced, self-contained yet her gaze open to Kandinsky/ the viewer. Her look is one of calm resignation. The near void in which she stands is unthreatening, not psychologically loaded as those of Schiele would become. The shadows cast by the light from the left are naturalistically rendered, the shape and features of her head and face in keeping with the photographs we have of her. Kandinsky has worked hard to create a likeness. I find the rendering of her upper torso and shoulders more interesting. Here, brush strokes become more loose, following the flow of fabrics across her body, and articulating the green/ blue bow. Blues and purples in the light-coloured fabric articulate shadows as they connect to the same in the empty background. Here, he allows himself to play the same sort of games that he plays in the more abstract landscapes of the time, as strokes flow and speak as much of themselves as paint on canvas and the gestures that made them, as of the shirt and body they depict. 

Two lines in particular call my attention: the one articulating the collar of the shirt, descending from her shoulder (front right) to the lower centre; and the profile line from her throat, down her left shoulder to the bottom of the painting. The first echoes the second. Of course, we could say they’re just there, articulating what he saw. But already in 1905, Kandinsky is seeing lines that speak for themselves, and to my eyes, these are beautiful lines. They are the lines that would become increasingly emancipated in later works, the very focus of the artist’s attentions, as the woman drifts into oblivion - see the lone figure in Composition V of 1911, allegedly Münter, leaving the scene of destruction and rebirth that’s depicted elsewhere in the painting, as she was to be forced to leave her relationship with Kandinsky. 

In 1905, this was a painting of devotion to two things: to a woman; and to painting. A tension sustains between the two. Jelena Hahl-Koch (Kandinsky, Thames and Hudson) is wrong when she agrees with Kandinsky, that it is a lousy painting.