Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter was a central figure of the Bavarian avant-garde and a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter alongside Wassily Kandinsky, with whom she shared an intense artistic and romantic partnership. Her home in Murnau—dubbed the 'Russian House'—became the intellectual and creative laboratory where abstract Expressionism was born.

Münter synthesized Bavarian reverse-glass folk painting with post-impressionist color theory, creating radically simplified still lifes, landscapes, and penetrating portraits. During the Nazi era, she heroically hid over 80 major works of Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Blue Rider members in her cellar, donating them in 1957 to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.