Gabriele Munter, The Years of Expressionism

Excellent and well written, this is the first English-language survey in depth of the bittersweet life and independent oeuvre of the pioneering Blue Rider artist Munter (1877-1962). She was first a student of and then a longtime artist/companion to Kandinsky, and her drawings, prints, and paintings deserve this wider recognition. (The monograph serves also as a catalog to 82 works traveling to four venues in the United States.) Only a few of the works here border on abstraction, but the artist led her colleagues to admiration for Bavarian folk art. Her technique, a synthesizing naturalism based on the scaffolding of deft, rapid draftsmanship, is a sort of shorthand cloisonne of glowing, saturated colors depicting still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and several remarkable, perhaps comic, deadpan portraits. Scholars should also consult Shulamith Behr's short essay on Munter in Delia Gaze's Dictionary of Women Artists (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997).