“When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim” - Gabriele Münter
Since its very inception, the Expressionist movement has occupied a fundamental place in art history, yet the works of perhaps its most electrifying pioneer did not enter broad public recognition until the 21st century. Born in Berlin in 1877, Gabriele Münter worked at the forefront of modern art in 20th-century Europe, producing over 800 paintings across the span of her career. Now, for the first time on this scale in the United States, audiences can appreciate firsthand why Münter is finally receiving a long-overdue appraisal. On view from November 7, 2025, through April 26, 2026, the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition Contours of a World offers a breathtaking selection of nearly 50 works by Münter—including paintings and rarely exhibited photographs.
Constantly experimenting, Münter worked to revitalize landscape, still-life, and portrait painting amid an era of rapid modernization that favored speed, technology, and city life over more traditional scenes. Münter’s work, however, was far from traditional; alongside painters Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, she co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an Expressionist group that rendered simplified forms with bold, non-naturalistic colors and thick, dark outlines. Rather than drawing directly from reality, she sought to “convey an essence,” offering an alternative to modernist movements that emphasized pure abstraction.
For nearly five years during World War I, Gabriele Münter lived and worked in Sweden and Denmark, having become enraptured with Scandinavia upon first arriving. In Stockholm, Münter quickly assimilated into the art scene, producing key Expressionist works that focused on intimate portraiture and richly saturated cityscapes. Most notable among a series of studies of women is Future (Woman in Stockholm), a portrait of the artist’s friend Gertrude Holz. The composition, with Holz placed unconventionally in the bottom third of the canvas, is strikingly dynamic—reminiscent of a photograph rather than a traditional portrait. Holz is seated behind a window, framed by a vase of tulips and rose colored curtains. Beyond the window, a row of Stockholm buildings extends across the upper half, dramatically traversed by a diagonal burst of sunlight. The colors and composition are a symphony.
Holz’s mood is hard to distinguish, yet the intensity of her gaze overflows with presence, sensibility, and, above all, agency. She is clearly her own person; although she does not dominate the composition, everything in the painting is aglow with her character. The curtains, the flowers, the buildings beyond the window, and the violent diagonal sunlight carry her psychology in their vivid pigmentation and textured, impasto strokes. The care Münter extends towards her subject is equally as palpable.
In another highlight, a small painting titled Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping), Münter depicts the cropped torso of a woman in a teal dress and white gloves (supposedly sitting close to her on the tram). A stack of colorful parcels sits neatly on her lap, crowned by a small geranium. The composition is simple, almost surprisingly so, yet observed with remarkable care. Münter shapes an ordinary arrangement into the first contours of an entire world—one that demands to be observed with languid intention and care.
A contour is not a direct rendition of an object, but simply an outline. However faint or abstracted, a contour only implies; yet the bareness of its form has the ability to express entire universes of meaning. As Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Attention is not a passive act, but one that requires deep empathy. To view Münter’s art of the everyday is to approach it with a deeply-held conviction that its beauty matters—and that attending to it is to wade into the infinite ocean of devotion, the inexorable current of the world.
Nearly three decades have passed since a Münter exhibition last toured the United States, and the Guggenheim’s curation affords a rare chance to observe the artwork of an underrecognized and extraordinary female pioneer—to look slowly, to attend with empathy, and perhaps to experience, however briefly, the devotion that she, too, once felt as she leaped into deep waters.