Gabriele

The small yellow house standing on a ridge overlooking Murnau, near Munich, speaks by its appearance of suffering and sorrow. The fence sags wearily, and the path leading to the front door last week lay buried under a foot-high pile of dead leaves. Yet the house is famous. It was purchased by the pioneer abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky and his onetime mistress, Gabriele Muenter, in 1908. There, at the age of 84, Gabriele Muenter still lives, an artist who is steadily gaining fame in her own right as one of the best of the German expressionists.

Last week Manhattan's Leonard Hutton Galleries had on display the first one-man Muenter show in the U.S.--44 paintings whose colors glow in bright chunks and whose landscapes shimmer under blazing skies. Gabriele is the sole surviving member of Germany's Blue Rider group, which included not only Kandinsky but Franz Marc and Paul Klee.* In spite of her bright palette, there is no gaiety in her canvases; they are intense, charged with emotion, and all a trifle sad--like the artist herself.

The Elegant Dilettante. Until she was 20, Berlin-born Gabriele Muenter thought that music would be her career; she had published a few songs, and she was an accomplished pianist. But she changed her mind, decided to become a painter, and soon headed for Munich, then and now a haven for the German avantgarde. In 1902 she started studying at a school called the Phalanx, an institution already intoxicated by the 20th century.

Her drawing teacher was Kandinsky, a former Moscow economics professor who had left Russia with his young wife to escape the stifling atmosphere of the Czarist regime. Since he had a substantial income, Kandinsky treated art as a hobby. He was a gifted and elegant dilettante with a penchant for the curvaceous style of art nouveau and for literary scenes--knights slaying dragons, virgins sitting by lily ponds. Then he fell in love with Gabriele Munter.

The Other Woman. They took an apartment, threw a gigantic engagement party, and though Kandinsky was not able to get a divorce for several years, he always introduced his new love as "Gabriele Muenter, my wife." It was a passionate, tempestuous affair, during which Kandinsky produced some of his greatest paintings and published his On the Spiritual in Art, which was almost the bible of abstraction. In 1916 the affair ended when Kandinsky decided to marry another woman. He gave Gabriele all the paintings he had done at Murnau (she later gave them to the city of Munich) and never mentioned her name again.

When a TIME correspondent sought out Gabriele in Murnau this month, he found her propped up against two dirty pillows, her frail body encased in layers of old sweaters, her skin as thin as parchment. Only her grey-green eyes had the sparkle of the passionate woman she once was, or of the artist who could look at a room, a street or a landscape and see it bathed in a rainbow. Had she ever done any abstractions? "Oh, yes, I did. I did them when I was with Kandinsky. But then, one day, he looked at them and said 'Rubbish,' and so I destroyed them." What kind of man was Kandinsky? "He was a very noble man." Was it not marvelous to have spent a life so close to creation? "It's not marvelous. It's not marvelous. It's terrible!" cried Gabriele Muenter. Then, dabbing her eyes with a moist handkerchief, she fell silent.

-The movement's name was thought up by Marc and Kandinsky over a cup of coffee. "We both loved blue," said Kandinsky later. "Marc loved horses. I loved riders. So the name came naturally."

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