Gabriele Münter (German, 1877–1962), Boating, 1910. Oil on canvas, 49 1/4 × 29 in. (125.1 × 73.66 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley. M1977.128. Photo: Cleber Bonato. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Fellow art students, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky entered a decade-long relationship as they became leaders of the Munich avant-garde, founding Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group in 1911. Boating was painted in Murnau, a town near Munich, where the artists went often, sometimes with their colleagues Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, from 1908 to 1914. On this outing Münter, her back to the viewer, captured Kandinsky, Werefkin, and Jawlensky’s son in a rowboat squarely facing the artist and the viewer. As he did in fact, here Kandinsky dominates, establishing the vertical center of this tightly woven painting in which figures and landscape alike are a mixture of rounded forms and primary colors. Münter’s role is subordinate but essential, the stabilizing force anchoring the balanced symmetry of the composition.
Excerpt from Collection Guide: Milwaukee Art Museum. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004
