I arrived at the Guggenheim for “Contours of a World,” the new show devoted to the late German artist Gabriele Münter, with what I thought was a deep appreciation of, and pretty solid familiarity with, her work. I was quickly proven wrong.
The first gallery I stepped into was full of black-and-white photographs; until then, I had only known Münter to paint. “She picked up a camera before she even picked up a brush,” says Guggenheim curator Megan Fontanella; the Guggenheim’s survey marks the first time her photographs have been exhibited in the United States.
“Contours of a World” also examines another overlooked force within Münter’s practice. Though she is closely associated with German Expressionism—even if her work was long overshadowed by her relationship with Wassily Kandinsky—in her early adulthood, Münter and her family spent significant time in America. Between 1898 and 1900, she traveled with her sister through Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas, using birthday money to buy herself a No. 2 Bulls-Eye Kodak camera to chronicle what her 23-year-old eyes saw.
She was a keen and curious observer from the start, and one who understood how to play with composition. One photograph shows a young girl in a stiff pinafore, her hair twisted into ringlets and head tilted away from the sun. (One of the long shadows cast around her clearly belongs to Münter, the subtle incorporation of the artist into the frame somewhat reminiscent of Vivian Maier.) In another, called “Three Women,” Münter captures three elegantly dressed Black women bookended by white children who stare as they stride through the town of Marshall, Texas for the Emancipation Day Festival on June 19, 1900—a day that has come to be known as Juneteenth. Münter would write to her brother back in Germany that she “was snapping as if her body and soul depended on it,” clearly understanding that she was bearing witness to something vitally important.
Fontanella sees Münter’s early experimentation with photography as a prelude to the paintings that would follow when she returned to Europe: her experiments with framing, perception, depth of field, and the interplay of light and shadow in her photography would come to life on her canvases, too. It’s clear in a painting like Breakfast of the Birds (1934), a work peculiar for the fact that its subject is turned away from the viewer. “Münter is thinking through layering what’s a close view, what’s a distance view, and what’s situated in the middle ground, and how it affects spatial relationships and perspective,” Fontanella says, “which is all tied to her looking through the lens.”
Across her work, Münter is looking intently at life’s goings on, and—as the show’s title suggests—making plain certain facets and contours, whether her subject was a friend, like the painter Gertrude Holz, or a random living room in Murnau, or scaffolding on a Parisian street. “I extract the most expressive aspects of reality and depict them simply, to the point, with no frills… the forms gather in outlines, the colors become fields, and contours—images—of the world emerge,” Münter one said, words that provide a sort of epigraph for the exhibit.
“Her adherence to life is what made her radical in her own time, when so many artists were thinking through fractured picture planes and moving towards this more abstract language as synonymous with modernity,” says Fontanella. “She was really pioneering by looking at the world around her.”
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So why has it taken so long for the art world to give Münter her moment? For the Guggenheim, the current exhibit serves as a course correction: the museum has only one 1930s-era painting by Münter in their permanent collection—a holding otherwise dominated by male peers of hers like Kandinsky and Franz Marc. “This show is a chance for us to say this is an artist we wish was more strongly represented in our collection,” says Fontanella.
Her hope is that exhibits like this one that emphasize the multiplicity of modernism will open the door for highlighting other overlooked artists in the future. But for Münter, her time is now. As the pace of information and images being thrown at us in our daily lives continues to pick up speed, her art, and the slow, introspective looking it invites us to do, feels like an antidote. As Fontanella puts it: “Münter always rewards you for spending time with her paintings.”
“Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through April 26, 2026.
