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Gabriele Münter Berlin 1877 - 1962 Murnau/Oberbayern Aus einer Schweizer Privatsammlung Dorfkirche in Riedhausen bei Murnau. Öl auf Karton. 1908. 32,9 : 40,6 cm. In Bleistift signiert u. datiert. Im Sommer des Jahres 1908 erkundeten Gabriele Münter u. Wassily Kandinsky von München aus das Umland u. entdeckten den malerischen Ort Murnau vor der Alpenkulisse. Gemeinsam mit Jawlensky u. Marianne von Werefkin quartierten sie sich in einem Gasthof ein, bevor Gabriele Münter im Jahr darauf das Haus in der Kottmüllerallee erwarb, das gemeinschaftlich bezogen wurde. - Die Dorfkirche St. Mauritius in Riedhausen bei Murnau lag in der Nähe und war leicht erreichbar.Solitary dwellings, like the summer villa she herself bought, fascinated Münter and appeared as a constant metaphoric presence in her landscape paintings. She demonstrated a similar fascination with white chapels and their Baroque towers and cupolas common to the alpine valleys and villages near Murnau. They too apear alone, enveloped in nature and emerging grandly from it. During her first visit, she fixed on a small chapel (Cat. No. 17), probably the one in Aidling, a farming community from whose elevation one sees a vast panoramic view of Riegsee lake, of the village Riegsee and Murnau, with the Alps rising as magnificent backdrop directly behind the town. Münter, who may have cycled or hiked there, chose not to attempt to portray the overwhelming drama of the scene laid out before here; instead, she painted the chapel, grandly monumental but on a small piece of strawboard. Given the setting, the painting is an ironic commentary on the fundamental impossibility of rendering the grand|E"of the alpine landscape as previous artists, who had accented each detail, had done. Münter recognized the need to depict fragments to represent the sense of the whole, and the need to render in simplified forms the magnificent alpine peaks nearby, staged so appropriately for the art in Murnau. During her outing to Aidling, the chapel - standing in the shadow of nearby trees - became an ironic painterly summation of the landscape experience. The plain white building pushes against the limitations of the rectangular field on which it is depicted, as if barely contained, and it blocks off all small segments of its surroundings. This effect grants the chapel its sense of monumentality, although Münter painted it with humorous incongruity on such a small scale (Reinhold Heller. Gabriele Münter. The Years of Expressionism. München - New York 1997, S. 153 mit Abb. eines ähnlichen Bildes auf S. 128, fälschlich als Dorfkirche in Aidling identifiziert (Milwaukee Art Museum). Wirdanken Frau Brigitte Salmen, Schloßmuseum Murnau für die Bestätigung der dargestellten Kirche. (32)