After Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky had returned from travelling through Europe and Northern Africa in April 1908, they often went on excursions into the Bavarian countryside, on one hand to find motifs to paint, on the other to be together. Finally, they settled on Murnau, where they also took their friends Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej Jawlensky. The four friends discovered the „Blue Land“, as they called it, and painted together. The village of Murnau and the surrounding mountains, lakes and moor became their favourite motifs.
Münter‘s painting went through a significant change at that time. The most important was a reduction of forms to the necessary, bordering on abstraction, paired with expressionist colours. The hardly modeled colour planes are stacked and evoke depth and three-dimensionality.
On August 21, 1909 Gabriele Münter bought a house in Murnau. Soon the people of Murnau called it the „Russian’s House“, since Kandinsky, Jawlensky, von Werefkin and other Russian artists were to be met there. Other guests were Franz Marc, August Macke und Arnold Schönberg.
As a founding member of the Blue Rider in 1911, Gabriele Münter played an important role in establishing a new painterly vocabulary in modern art.
