Gabriele Münter and
Johannes Eichner Foundation

September 2019—Summer 2021

One hundred and ten years ago, on August 21, 1909, Gabriele Münter bought a home in Murnau in which art history would be written. Now widely known as the Münter House, the comprehensively renovated building was opened to the public as a museum in 1999. To celebrate the double anniversary, we have designed a special exhibition that turns the spotlight on the Münter House as a hub of creative inspiration. The show focuses on the Blue Rider years as well as events in 1934 that exemplify the house's history in the 1930s.

The Münter House in Murnau is famous as one of the birthplaces of modern art. Between 1909 and 1914, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky stayed at their country home for extended periods of time. It was in Murnau that Münter broke through to a new visual idiom, and the motifs Kandinsky found in the surrounding landscapes guided him toward abstraction. On more than one occasion, the two hosted visiting fellow artists at the Münter House. In the fall of 1911, Kandinsky invited Franz and Maria Franck-Marc and August and Elisabeth Macke to Murnau to edit the now famous almanac "The Blue Rider." Having returned from Scandinavia, where she had spent the war years, in 1920, Münter would often come to her home in Murnau for much-needed seclusion, although she did not make it her permanent residence until 1931. A few years later, her partner Johannes Eichner moved in with her.

The exhibition, which takes up the entire building, introduces visitors to the Münter House as a scene of lively gatherings both before the Great War and over the decades that followed. The presentation on the ground floor, which has been completely redesigned for the first time since 1999, includes a selection of photographs. Thirteen new paintings by Münter, eight of which have never been on public display, will be on view in the other rooms. In another first, the Münter House will now also host contemporary art, in the form of a new work by the Munich-based artist Caro Jost: decades after Gabriele Münter's death, the Münter House remains a place of inspiring encounters between creative minds.

Isabelle Jansen and Matthias Mühling

The interest in Münter’s work is growing continuously. The painter is represented in numerous exhibition projects around the world. The Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, which manages the artist’s estate and thus also her house in Murnau, has been pursuing a lively exhibition policy for years, with the aim of propagating Münter’s art in accordance with the Foundation’s objective.

Currently the exhibition "Under the Open Sky. Traveling with Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter" is being held at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich for which the Münter-Eichner Foundation has provided over 250 loans.

The Münter exhibition which the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern is planning for January 2022 in cooperation with the Münter-Eichner Foundation will present almost exclusively works from the Foundation’s collection. Such projects provide an opportunity to show the public unknown paintings by Münter or paintings that have not been exhibited for decades. This is also the case with the new presentation in the Münter House that, parallel to the current exhibition "Gabriele Münter and Her Guests", introduces eight lesser known paintings to visitors, as well as several of the artist’s personal effects. The timespan ranges from 1910 to 1959. The selection predominantly comprises landscapes and still lifes: a winter landscape from the 1920s is, stylistically, a reminder of the time Münter spent in Scandanavia from 1915 until 1920; a still life with a black mask recalls the world of the theatre. Münter was in fact an avid theatregoer. City life is evoked in a study for a scene in a department store. These diverse worlds are united through the compositional means employed by the painter. The cropping of pictures as well as the unconventional use of perspective are reminiscent of photographic techniques and show how the artist never committed herself exclusively to one single creative pattern. The thirty-two paintings and photographs on view throughout the Münter House reflect the wide range of Münter’s creativity.

The Münter-Haus in Murnau is open.

Mon: closed
Tue–Sun and
on public holidays: 2pm–5pm
On December 24, and December 31, the museum is closed.

In order to protect your health and that of our staff, we ask you to follow the current hygiene rules in the Münter-Haus.

muenter-stiftung.de/en