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After so many years: the summits of the Alps rise up over the Murnauer Moos like the backdrop of a landscape of the mind; this is how “Miss Münter” captured the scene in oil nearly half a century before, in 1910. Trees, clouds, and mountains are reduced to elementary geometric forms and, like the sky and the meadows, shine forth in artificial hues of poisonous green, yellow, and violet. One year before, under Kandinsky’s persuasion, she purchased the newly-built house in Murnau, Bavaria, with a view to the east, over the valley basin and onto the village and church hill. Together with Kandinsky, Alexei von Javlensky, and Marianne von Werefkin, the artist worked in Murnau over the summer months, living a simple life entirely in the spirit of the avant-garde, which celebrated primitivism. She tended the garden and furnished the house with her own paintings, religious folk art, and local handicraft. Just as the myth of the so-called “Russian Villa” was inseparably tied to the founding of the artists’ group The Blue Rider, the village’s fame is founded in the extraordinary relationship that connected Münter and Kandinsky both in their art and their lives.
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