MÜNTER, Gabriele (Berlin, 1877 – Murnau, 1962)
Notwithstanding the difficulties that women artists could encounter in receiving an adequate training, Gabriele Münter studied art both in Düsseldorf (1897) and Munich (1901). Between 1898 and 1901 Münter travelled to America where she visited St. Louis and New York. On her return, unhappy with her apprenticeship, she took a major leap by attending the evening classes taught by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky at the Phalanxschule where she also approached the Jugendstil. From 1902 until 1914 her research became intimately intertwined with Kandinsky’s. Their mutual collaboration was also reinforced by a personal relationship which lasted until 1914 when Kandinsky moved back to Russia. The couple often travelled abroad. In Paris Münter deeply admired the Impressionist masters, integrating their teachings into her contemporary production of large scale landscapes, including In Kallmünz (1903, Private Collection) and Straße in Sèvres (1906–1907, Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus). By the end of the decade the artist also began to express herself through other art mediums such as woodcut, linocut and drawings. In 1907 she exhibited at the Parisian Salon d’Automne a series of coloured linocuts portraits that included a portrait of Kandinsky. By 1911 the artist adopted a more intensive palette mostly consisting of primary colours and together with Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Franz Marc participated in the genesis of Der Blaue Reiter which became a fundamental organisation for the development of German Expressionism. During the war she and Kandinsky moved temporarily to Switzerland and after he had left for Russia, Münter remained inactive for a period. The artist later returned to Germany and although seriously affected by Nazi censorship she continued working. Gabriele Münter died in her house in Murnau, Bavaria on 19 May 1962.
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Zoran Music
Görz [now Gorizia], 1909
Anton Zoran Music was born on 11 February 1909 in Gorizia (Italy) which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After an initial fascination with the works of Klimt and Schiele, which he discovered during his family’s sojourns in Vienna, and thanks to the advice of the Croatian painter Babic, his teacher at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb, Music moved to Spain in 1935. There, he travelled all over the wide Castilian landscapes, and spent long sessions working in the Prado copying El Greco and Goya, whose black romanticism greatly influenced his later works. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War took him to Dalmatia, where he discovered the semi-desert and petrified landscapes of Kras and at the start of the Second World War he moved to Venice, where he held his first individual exhibition as early as 1943. In 1944 he was accused of supporting the anti-Nazi groups, arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Dachau concentration camp. There, in a sort of creative frenzy, he made about 180 drawings of his dead friends, which can be considered the origin of paintings made between 1970 and 1975, We are not the last, a series of “collective deaths” which Music understood as the cry of the eternally suffering humanity, like the evidence of a collective trauma beyond all individual traits. After various sojourns in Venice, Music settled in Paris in 1952, and worked on paintings whose abstract appearance conceals constant memories of the arid landscapes of Dalmatia (Dalmatian Lands and Rocky Landscapes) and of the light and the sky of Venice. In Paris he also made some etchings in Lacourières studio, for which he was awarded the Grand Prix in the Graphic Arts competition at the Venice Biennial Exhibition in 1956, and in 1957 he received the Graphic Arts Prize in Ljubljana. After the first retrospective presentation of his oeuvre at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1972, various retrospective exhibitions were held, in particular in 1977 in Darmstadt, in 1992 at the Albertine in Vienna, exhibiting his work on paper, and those of the Grand Palais in Paris in 1995, which included, in addition to his landscapes, two new series by the artist, his Self-Portraits (1987) and Workshops (1990).
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Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Berlin, 1902 – Cologne, 1968
The son of a government counsellor of the German Kaiserreich, Ernst Wilhelm Nay received a humanistic education. In 1921, after obtaining the Abitur (high school diploma), he began to paint. In 1925 he enrolled in the painting class of Karl Hofer, a teacher at the Berliner Akademie. Nay studied intensively Picasso, Kirchner, Matisse and Poussin. When he left the Akademie in 1928, he had already exhibited at the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin and had the support of critics like Paul Westheim. He painted still lifes, portraits and landscapes. In 1929 he joined the Association of Berlin Artists, thus making new contacts and increasing his chances of holding exhibitions. The following year, the Nationalgalerie bought one of his beach scenes. In 1931 Nay was granted a nine-month scholarship for Villa Massimo in Rome, where he developed his own style, initially marked by abstract surrealist compositions and paintings of ornamental mythical animals. His trips to the Baltic Sea and his sojourns in Norway, where he met Munch, and his visits to the Lofoten island, defined the subjects of his artistic world. In 1937 he was affected by the exhibition ban imposed by the national-socialists. Two of his landscapes were shown in the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). He was enlisted in 1940, and spent most of his time as a cartographer in France, where the amateur sculptor Pierre Térouanne put his studio at Nay’s disposal, so that he could carry on working. Ernst Jünger visited him and bought his painting Elk’s Head. After 1945, Nay worked on various sets of works, ranging from the mythic-abstract Paintings of Hecate, to the abstract Scheibenbilder, to the ornamental reductionism of his later work. Nay took advantage of the international vogue for abstract painting as the world’s aesthetic language. In 1950 his first retrospective exhibition was held in Hanover. The acknowledgement of this artist in and outside Germany is confirmed by his participation in three editions of the Documenta of Kassel. In 1948 Nay took part in the Venice Biennale and in 1956 he represented there the German Federal Republic. After the controversy triggered by his contribution to the 1964 Documenta, the so called Eye Paintings, his artistic career ended. Nay died four years later at the age of 65.
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