Great art brings fame and money? Yes, yes. Sometimes. Often, however, those affected no longer find out about this because they are long dead when everyone is racing for their works and prices go up. Whether someone is celebrated posthumously depends not only on the quality of the work, but also on the openness or even obtuseness of those born after them. Things are no fairer in afterlife than in life.
This certainly applies to one group: painting avant-gardists. In many cases their success followed a U-curve. They began with sensational works in a dynamic environment, then became impoverished as older artists and finally disappeared into the footnotes of art history – only to be recognized on a large scale around a century after their first exhibitions, so: now.
“God’s spark is in you,” cheered Kandinsky
The expressionist Gabriele Münter is currently receiving belated admiration. Around 70,000 people have already seen the film “Münter und Kandinsky” (director: Marcus O. Rosenmüller), produced by Alice Brauner, which has been in cinemas for a good two weeks. From Münter’s perspective, the film tells the ambivalent love story between the virtuoso of color and her teacher and colleague, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. This love apparently failed because of Kandinsky’s commitment problems and not because of artistic competition: the two of them, together with Franz Marc and others in Murnau and Munich, founded the Blauer Reiter artists’ association and exhibited together. “God’s spark is in you, which is so incredibly rare to find in painters,” Kandinsky once applauded his girlfriend’s talent.
After the separation, she kept numerous of his works and hid them in the basement of her Murnau house during the National Socialist era. For her 80th birthday in 1957, Münter donated a good part of her Blaue Reiter collection to the Lenbachhaus in Munich, which became world famous. However, this only helped her own fame to a limited extent in the 20th century. Although the museum has owned paintings by her since then, and a foundation manages her estate, the woman who died in 1962 was remembered nationally for a long time primarily as the lover of a genius and the savior of his art.
Munich and Murnau museum visitors have long known that Gabriele Münter was much more: a driving force of the Expressionist movement, a sensitive portraitist and passionate landscape painter who naturally combined tradition and modernity in her fires of color with bold brushstrokes. In recent years, Münter’s works have finally been shown in major exhibitions abroad, in Bern, Copenhagen and Vienna. A retrospective opens in Madrid next Tuesday, followed by Paris next. There are currently two exhibitions running in Herford. The market is also moving along, with individual Münter works now trading at six to seven figures. The art world should actually apologize to Gabriele Münter that everything took so long.