Gabriele Münter – Painting without Reservation

A tour of the exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne, Paris (4 April - 24 August 2025) 

with Chris Boïcos

This is the first ever retrospective in France of the German artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), co-founder in 1911 with her companion, the Russian artist, Vassily Kandinsky, of the Munich avant-garde art movement « The Blue Rider » (Blaue Reiter). Gabriele Münter is one of the key Expressionist painters of the early modern period in Germany, and belongs to the first generation of truly independent women artists of the early 1900s. She is furthermore instrumental in hiding and saving the paintings in her collection of her Blue Rider colleagues, Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, Alexej Jawlensky, and Marianne von Werefkin from the Nazi authorities in the 1930s. This unparalleled collection of modern art she bequeathed to the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich in 1957.

The current exhibition offers a unique opportunity to discover the often overlooked art of Münter in the extraordinarily rich context of her period, the pre-WWI years in Germany, the dramatic war years, during which she was separated from Kandinsky, and that of the Weimar republic of the 1920s.