Gabriele Münter. Painting without detours

After Sonia Delaunay in 2014–2015, Paula Modersohn-Becker in 2016, and Anna-Eva Bergman in 2023, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris continues its series devoted to pioneers of modern art with Parisian ties, with Gabriele Münter. Initially planned for 2021 but thwarted by Covid, the retrospective finally took shape four years later, organized in partnership with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, where an initial section was presented.

It is the first large-scale French monographic presentation devoted to the German artist, who — outside her native country — has been reduced at best to her role as a pioneer of Expressionism, and at worst to her status as the companion of Vassily Kandinsky. This amounts to less than a decade of her long career of about sixty years. Evidence of this is the only French monographic precedent, held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux twenty years ago, Gabriele Münter, une artiste du Cavalier bleu, as well as the various group exhibitions that have revealed more or less significant selections of her work over the past decades. One thinks, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, of Figures du Moderne. L’expressionnisme en Allemagne or Fauvisme ou “l’épreuve du feu”, in 1992 and 1999, but also of the more recent Couples modernes at the Centre Pompidou Metz, or Franz Marc, August Macke. L’aventure du Cavalier bleu at the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2018–2019.