Gabriele Münter Painting

In the summer of 1903 Kandinsky took his art students to Kallmünz, a small Bavarian town, to paint out of doors. One of them was Gabriele Münter, who had studied under him at the Phalanx school he ran in Munich. That summer the two became secretly engaged. He was still married, and although his divorce came through in 1911, the two of them never married. There is nothing abstract about the picture. Kandinsky, who a decade later would help invent abstract art, works here in thick knife-strokes of colour, closer to Impressionism than to anything he is remembered for. Münter stands at her easel, painting, which is how he saw her most days. Decades later she gave dozens of these early canvases to a Munich museum, which is why this one is still here.