Габриэле Мюнтер

People know Kandinsky as the man who walked painting into pure abstraction, but in 1905 he was still years from that, working in oils that show exactly what they show. This is Gabriele Munter, a painter herself and by then his companion. They had met in Munich when she enrolled in his class, and were travelling Europe together. He gives her a plain, sober treatment, dark background, steady gaze, none of the colour-storms to come. The abstraction was still half a decade off and would take shape only after the two of them settled in the Bavarian town of Murnau. There is a reason so many of Kandinsky's early paintings survive in one Munich museum. Munter hid them through the Nazi years and, in 1957, handed them to the Lenbachhaus, where this portrait hangs.