Gabriele Münter - Sinnende (Woman in Thought)

Gabriele Münter, Sinnende (Woman in Thought), 1917, oil on canvas, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, München

The model for this painting was a young Swedish woman, Gertrude Holz. Gabriele Münter met and befriended her after travelling to Scandinavia following the outbreak of the first world war. Münter had until then been in a relationship with the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky who tutored her at his Phalanx School in Munich just after the turn of the century. Münter went on to play a pivotal role in the loose grouping of German Expressionist artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) that also included Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and August Macke, although at the time Sinnende was painted her work was showing more of the influence of Matisse and his fellow Fauvist artists (including members of the Swedish avant-garde), even if she retained a feeling for the symbolic force of colour that the Blue Rider approach championed.

I think the painting of Gertrude Holz is a fascinating example of a fusion between these schools, as it combines a sense of Blue Rider primitivism and spirituality with the freedom from three dimensional constraints and the brushstroke spontaneity of Fauvism. Kandinsky had apparently ended their relationship at the time (he had returned to Russia), although rather dishonourably, he seems to have neglected to actually let her know. Does Münter channel these artistic influences to project something of her own anxious day dreaminess onto Holz, her ruminations on the state of her romantic liaison and its soon to be permanent rupture?

Unusually, Münter uses a landscape size format for a portrait subject, positioning the model to the left. The figure is swaddled by her clothing and gazes upwards and to our left beyond the confines of the canvas as if her body is warmed sufficiently against the ambient coldness to stimulate her thoughts, or to be undistracted by the room’s low temperature. With her gloved hand to her lips, the figure seems to display with her gesture, the prevention, denial or withholding of articulated speech. It is a pose not just of musing but of being truly lost in thought; it speaks of absence. This is a painting which deals with the interiority of the mind but affords as much space and pictorial attention to the interior of the domestic setting; the exterior world is not completely absent however and wintry daylight can be seen through the window to the rear. This window is divided into rectangular panes and echoes the strong rectangular lines of the table, the back of Holz’s seat and the vertical line of the curtain. These black straight lines mark a distinction between rational, logical and intellectual cognition and the more curvilinear forms of the flowers and fruit (and what might be a deep green chaise longue or cushions on the right?) that represent something more like reasonless introspection and tumbling inner turmoil. It would be too fanciful to say that Holz’s hair, specifically the vee division of her fringe, is suggestive of this mental schism; it is unlikely to have been a conscious choice for the artist to paint it this way with this idea in mind, but the forms made by the figure and the interior scene she inhabits do combine to express bifurcations that are physical and psychic: between the straight and sinuous, between hope and fear.

Because of the modernist flattening of perspective, the flowers are made to appear to have sprouted from Holz’s head. This efflorescence and the softness of the violet blue petals suggest feelings of tendresse within the mind while the green leaves are more suggestive of a cuckold’s horns. Is this again a projection of the artist’s conflicted and confused feelings? Is this a depiction of conjectured betrayal comingled with the persistence of love? The red fruit, which have symbolised love, temptation and forbidden knowledge in western Christian art for centuries, are here shown resting on a dish on the table and remain uneaten while the red lampshade sits on a disjointed lampstand and is unlit, yielding no illumination, real or metaphorical. In fact, the lighting is noteworthy more generally. The fruit is backlit by the meagre daylight penetrating the opaque window, while the right side of Holz’s face (the left as we look at it) is lit from the other side, highlighting its pallor and allowing clear definition of eyes, eyebrows and nose. Yet no matter what degree of exterior revelation exists for the viewer, the figure’s mind’s eye remains locked in.

Painted at around the same time, a more obviously hopeful painting is called Zukunft (Future).

Gabriele Münter, Zukunft (Future), 1917, Oil on canvas, The Cleveland Museum of Art

The figure (the model again was Holz) this time is positioned at the foot of the painting and wears a more smiling and less equivocal expression. The yellow tulips incline mostly towards her head and represent happiness and enlightenment while the red ones, standing for love, point upwards. These are flowers that bloom in the spring, a time for renewal and growth.  The scene through the window and beyond the drawn-back pink curtains shows us early morning golden sunlight cast onto the building opposite, slowly but surely chasing away the shadow of the dawn down its facade. The figure is shown inclining slightly as if leaning into and welcoming the future of the title with keen anticipation. Her fringe remains unparted, and her hair is abundant, styled in a clearly modern, if slightly androgynous way.

Unlike Sinnende, the palette here is fresher and more vibrant, the lightweight dress, facial cosmetics and soft furnishings reflecting a pervasive mood of cheerfulness and optimism. The interior of Sinnende is almost claustrophobic by comparison, and the clothing suggests a disconsolate want of warmth while Zukunft’s atmosphere is open, warm and welcoming to the outside world, its blue sky and lambent light are framed like a picture within a picture, signposting a sense of recursive progression.

One curious aspect of Sinnende is what looks like branches that lean away from the figure and across the window. These may be so-called 'julkarve', or a Christmas sheaf.

There exists a country tradition in Scandinavia in which the last bundles of wheat of the year’s crop are placed outside doorways at Christmastime. These were originally meant to provide food for birds which might otherwise raid the grain stored in barns for winter but essentially, they are a marker of hoped-for good fortune, of anticipation of a fruitful harvest to come in the year to follow. By giving something back to the birds, it is said, you might reap abundance in return. I think that Münter’s faith in a similar reciprocity of emotion is called into doubt in the painting. Or at least, it depicts a fear that the giving flows in only one direction. At the simplest level, the dead sheaf set amidst the matt and sombre tones of the room contrasts with the flowers and the fruit to make the work not just about introspection but also about the melancholia of love unrequited and connects her thoughts and emotions to a more primitive, pagan folklore, so admired by The Blue Rider group, in which some solace might be found.