At the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, Gabriele Münter, a prodigious framing artist, emerges from the shadows

These days, it's a good thing we never stop highlighting artists that art history has overlooked, for example because they were women, or worse still, "women of." Thus, in the still recent past, when the German artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was mentioned, it was less for her work – largely ignored – or for her commitment – ​​she was co-founder in 1911 in Munich of the Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) movement – ​​than because she was, during this period, the student and then the companion of another of the co-founders, a formidable theorist and talented painter, considered one of the precursors, if not the inventor, of abstract art, Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).

The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is presenting its first retrospective in France: it's quite a surprise. Firstly, because, after the entrance, with the almost obligatory welcome by Kandinsky's portrait of her in 1905, she begins with what one wouldn't expect: not paintings, but photographs. She took them during her travels, in the United States (1898-1900) where she had family, then in 1905 with Kandinsky, in Tunisia. The museum is showing a selection of hundreds of black and white shots in which the apprentice photographer—she acquired her first camera, a Kodak Bull's Eye, upon arriving in Abilene, Texas, in 1898 and learned on the job—revealed herself as a prodigy of framing and composition. This brand-new talent would have a fundamental importance in her work, permeating all of her oeuvre.

You have 70.41% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.