Word: municheer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gabriele Munter, Kandinsky's mistress for more than 13 years, who never once looked at the pictures the old master left with her in 1914. Last month, on her 80th birthday, frail, white-haired Gabriele turned the whole collection (valued at $500,000) over to the city of Munich. Last week, unrelenting to the end, she refused to visit the exhibition at the Municipal Gallery, which included some of her own work...
Every Day a Festival. When Gabriele Munter first met Kandinsky in Munich at the beginning of the century, she was a sad-faced girl with brown hair and big eyes, who longed to paint. Kandinsky, who at 30 with his young wife had fled a dull job as an economics professor in Russia, was already the leader of a group of independent artists, and taught painting at their school. Gabriele became his favorite student. He kept her after class, took her on painting jaunts. The following year they left on a five-year tour of Europe and North, Africa...
...Paris they met Matisse and the other Fauves, the "Wild Beasts" who revolted against impressionism. When they returned to Munich in 1908, they settled in an apartment in suburban Schwabing, which became the headquarters of the Munich Fauves. Paul Klee lived two houses away, and near by were Alfred Kubin, Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky, August Macke. In painting excursions through southern Bavaria, Kandinsky and Gabriele discovered the village of Murnau, where they bought a house, called to this day the Russenhaus, with a fine view of the Alpine foothills. Kandinsky held court there too. "Every day is like a festival...
After launching abstract painting, the group was quickly broken up when the war came in 1914 and Kandinsky had to leave Germany. At first Gabriele joined him in neutral Switzerland. But when he went to Moscow, she returned to Munich, and the end came in 1916 after a final three months together in Stockholm. Gabriele's black mood was reflected in the bleak, burnt-out landscapes she painted on the ship going home. One year after Kandinsky left her, by then divorced from his first wife, he married the daughter of a Russian general; he survived the Communist Revolution...
Gabriele kept all the paintings Kandinsky had left with her, hiding them in Munich in storage during the first years of the Hitler regime when the Nazis wanted to burn them as decadent, and later building a storage room in the cellar of the Russenhaus, where the paintings remained until they were delivered to the Munich gallery. Last week, beyond one tight-lipped admission ("He was very aristocratic"), she refused to talk about Kandinsky. A brittle octogenarian with startlingly candid eyes and a gentle face, Gabriele still lives in the Russenhaus. The wooden staircase was decorated long...