1902 , the year Wassily Kandinsky painted the present work, was an inflection point in the artist’s personal life and career. An exceptionally rare early portrait of Kandinsky’s partner from the year they became involved, Kochel – Gabriele Münter is a superb illustration of Kandinsky’s influences on his path toward abstraction over the following decade.

In the summer of 1902, Kandinsky brought his Phalanx School art students to Kochel, a village south of Munich at the base of the Alps. Among these students was Gabriele Münter, the subject and initial owner of the present painting (see figs. 1 & 2). Kandinsky was the first teacher to take Münter’s artistic talents seriously and to regard her “as a consciously striving human being” (Münter quoted in Reinhold Heller, Gabriele Münter: The Years of Expressionism, 1903-1920, New York, 1997, p. 12). The two forged a strong relationship as teacher and student (as well as artist and subject), which quickly became romantic and remained as such for fourteen years. Together, Kandinsky and Münter traveled through Europe and North Africa, learning from each other, their fellow artists and their changing surroundings.

In Kochel, Kandinsky and his pupils painted en plein air in a naturalistic, impressionistic style. The majority of Kandinsky’s paintings from this era were landscapes; thus, the present portrait is a rarity, with the closest comparable in a museum collection (see fig. 3). These two portraits of Münter in Kochel borrow elements of Impressionist and Pointillist techniques in terms of palette and short brushstrokes. They are both figurative and naturalistic, but they also hint at a preference for expressive brushstrokes and colors over carefully-rendered subject matter.

Kandinsky’s 1910 painting of the same subject—Münter in profile against a mountainous landscape—speaks to just how much his artistic approach developed over the course of a decade (see fig. 4). Moreover, Kandinsky here depicts Münter in front of an easel, nodding to her role as an artistic collaborator rather than just a subject. A similar painting of Kandinsky framed by mountains, executed by Münter just a year prior, speaks to how closely the two worked and developed as artists (see fig. 5).

In 1911, Kandinsky and Münter helped found the avant-garde group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which included Alexej von Jawlensky, Franz Marc and August Macke. The group sought to liberate painting from the figurative in order to reach a symbolic dimension which unified man and nature. In this pursuit, Kandinsky turned to abstraction.

It is important to note, though, that Kandinsky saw abstraction not as a radical break with tradition, but rather as a natural growth from his earlier work, including his time in Kochel.

Kochel – Gabriele Münter captures a critical early moment in Kandinsky’s artistic growth. The evanescence and tenderness with which Kandinsky captured Münter is rare in his oeuvre, but it also points to the role Münter would play in Kandinsky’s development. In both the present work and its companion (see fig. 3), Kandinsky chose to depict Münter’s hat in colors and brushstrokes almost identical to the immediately surrounding background. The result is a subtle blending of foreground and background—of human and nature. Here is the seed for Kandinksy’s goal to come: the harmonious unity of man and nature, later rendered more overtly through abstraction.