School House, Murnau
Artist: Gabriele Münter (German, 1877-1962)
Date: 1908
Medium: Oil on cardboard
Collection: Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain
Description
This painting marks the transition from Münter's earlier Impressionist-derived work to the Expressionism she, Kandinsky and Jawlensky evolved that summer at Murnau. Depicted is one of Murnau's largest and plainest buildings in a deceptively simple composition, with no more than eight planar elements that are juxtaposed sharply one to another, distinguished by colour and by outline. Colours appear in large, relatively un-nuanced planes enlivened from time to time by small touches of brilliant, intense hues. Simplicity, reduction and balance characterise the work. However, in antithesis to these compositional principles, broad strokes of the brush, thin paint, sketched shapes, bare areas of cardboard, all seem to signify a rapid painting process, a kind of automatic creation that submerges consciousness within an intuitive act of image making. "Most of my successful works were painted quickly and without corrections, " Münter wrote late in her life, "as if by themselves." But this effortlessness was sought and fostered.
