Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Dr. Isabelle Jansen. This work will be included in the forthcoming Gabriele Münter catalogue raisonné of paintings, currently being prepared by the Gabriele Münter und Johannes Eichner Stiftung.

Provenance
The artist's estate, no. 358.
Thomas Borges Collection, UK (acquired by the 1960s).
Private collection, UK (by descent from the above).


The present work was painted in 1907, during Gabriele Münter's formative stay in Paris with her companion Wassily Kandinsky. At the beginning of the 20th century, the French capital was the epicentre of European modern art, attracting artists from across Europe and beyond, and Münter immersed herself fully in this environment. She and Kandinsky arrived in May 1906, first lodging in the Latin Quarter before moving to Sèvres, on the city's outskirts, while from November 1906 to March 1907 she also rented a studio at 58, rue Madame. There, she found herself in the very same building as Sarah and Michael Stein, the eminent American collectors whose salon introduced her to the work of Gauguin, Bonnard, Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse. This exposure to French modernism, and especially the Fauves with their radical use of colour, proved decisive for Münter, foreshadowing her subsequent embrace of Expressionism.

Equally influential was the close creative exchange with Kandinsky. Their partnership, which had begun as a teacher–student relationship, quickly evolved into an artistic dialogue that shaped both their practices. The present work bears striking affinities with Kandinsky's plein-air oil sketches from this period, where thick, overlapping strokes are applied with a palette knife to produce vibrant, almost abstract emanations of the landscape. Both artists sought to rapidly distil emotional intensity from natural motifs, and Münter's Paris works, like Kandinsky's contemporaneous studies, reveal a liberation of colour and form that prefigures the Expressionist language of Der Blaue Reiter.

The present work reveals a view captured directly from life, in which vivid colour structures the composition. Bei Paris I most probably precedes Bei Paris II (Brooklyn Museum, New York), a work of identical format and comparable sensibility, most likely executed in the same creative sequence. The small scale of the composition lends itself to plein-air painting: Münter rapidly seizes a view that has caught her attention, with a spontaneity akin to photography. Rather than depicting an overall scene, Münter sought to distil the essence of the street she was in, capturing a fleeting impression and fixing it swiftly. As she observed: 'My main difficulty was I could not paint fast enough. My pictures are all moments of life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously' (Münter quoted in Gabriele Münter: The Years of Expressionism 1903–1920, New York, 1997).

This Parisian sojourn, of which the present work is a marvellous example, remains a decisive stage in Münter's trajectory. It would propel her, a few years later, back to Munich, where she would become a founding member of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists' Association of Munich) and, in 1911, of Der Blaue Reiter, alongside Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke and Paul Klee.