Murnau - Castle and Church

In August 1909 Gabriele Münter bought a house on the slope above Murnau, a market town on the Staffelsee in the Bavarian foothills. Neighbours called it the Russians' house. Kandinsky worked there with her for years, and this is the view from its windows, the gable of the medieval castle and the tower of the parish church, pressed into a few flat, strong colours and put down in oil on cardboard rather than canvas. He had spent that January in Munich founding a new artists' association and taking the chair of it. Around the same time he and Münter began collecting Bavarian reverse-glass painting, folk images with hard outlines and blunt colour, which is usually named as the source of the flattening in his Murnau views. Münter kept this one for 48 years and gave it to the city of Munich in 1957, on her 80th birthday.