Mountain village with church

Details

With a confirmation from Dr Isabelle Jansen, Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich, dated 14.3.2024. The work is listed in the artist’s estate under the number L 250 and will be included in the catalogue raisonné of the paintings.

Provenance:

Estate of the artist, on the reverse with the stamp (not in Lugt) and two labels with the estate number “L 250” and the number “1274”;

Galerie Thomas, Munich;

Private property, Southern Germany.

Description

– The painting reveals Münter’s return to her characteristic style of the pre-war period in Murnau

– The artist shows the rural idyll of an Upper Bavarian village in the foothills of the Alps

– Village views are among the most important themes in Münter’s oeuvre

With her first visits to Murnau, Gabriele Münter firmly incorporated the village into her pictorial canon. Alongside her landscape depictions, her views of villages became one of the most important themes in her oeuvre. After somewhat distanced and more broadly focussed depictions of houses and street scenes in the 1920s, Münter returned in the early 1930s to the scenes created in the early Murnau years and in the “Blue Land”. The previously favoured strong contouring with black outlines is now abandoned in favour of a barely perceptible accentuation.

In our painting, the viewer’s gaze first focuses on a central group of buildings: a nested cluster of farmhouses and the adjoining grey-brown sheds. Behind them, a pointed church tower looks up in a filigree manner. This part of the picture is flanked by the green of the surrounding wooded mountains. Between them, a self-contained, blue-grey mountain formation rises dynamically and tapers pyramidally towards the centre. The flattened mountain peak is reminiscent of the Ettal Notkarspitze and the Kramerberg.