Kallmünz - Gabriele Münter painting I

In the summer of 1903 Kandinsky took the students of his Munich painting school, the Phalanx, to Kallmünz, a small town on the river Naab in the Upper Palatinate, to paint outdoors. He was 37 and ran the school. Gabriele Münter, 26, was one of the students, and during those weeks the two became engaged, in secret, since Kandinsky was still married to his cousin Anja and would remain so until 1911. He painted her at her easel twice that summer. Here she stands in a long blue dress on a board 24 by 33 centimetres, a white parasol rigged on a pole to shade her work, the bridge over the Naab and the red roofs of the town behind her. She wrote the year and both their names on the back, kept the picture for 54 years, and gave it to Munich in 1957.