The story
Gabriele Münter settled in Murnau in 1909, and with Wassily Kandinsky she turned this small market town at the foot of the Alps into one of the birthplaces of the Blue Rider circle. The castle museum follows that story. It shows more than 70 works by Münter from every stage of her career, alongside material on the Blue Rider and the New Artists' Association of Munich. The local craft of reverse painting on glass, which both artists collected and learned from, has its own rooms.
Among the pictures is a head of a young woman by Franz Marc, painted in 1906. The sitter is Maria Franck, a painter who later became his wife, and the canvas is a fragment that Marc cut from a larger picture he had painted that year. Another section is given to the writer Ödön von Horváth, whose family had a house in Murnau.
The building is older than any of it. A medieval residential tower forms its core, and for more than 400 years it served as the local seat of administration for the Benedictine abbey of Ettal. After secularisation in 1803 it held flats and a school, and it opened as a museum in 1993.
