The GABRIELE MÜNTER- UND JOHANNES EICHNER-STIFTUNG was established in Munich in 1965 and administrates the estate of the artist. In the course of an inventory-taking of the foundation’s holdings in the late 1960’s, all works received on the verso or old mount convolute numbers written by hand in pencil, which also appear on the sheets shown in this publication. The term “house catalogue” is used by the foundation to refer to the numerous, mostly small-format notebooks that Gabriele Münter filled over many years with preliminary studies and written observations.
The abbreviations GMS stand for the GABRIELE-MÜNTER-STIFTUNG, in the possession of the Lenbachhaus in Munich since 1957. This extraordinarily rich collection remained unknown to the public well into the 1950’s. Only after Hans Konrad Roethel, a committed proponent of modernism, was named director of Munich’s Städtische Galerie in 1956 did Gabriele Münter make, on the occasion of her 80th birthday on February 19, 1957, one of the greatest gifts in modern museum history to the Lenbachhaus, and to the city of Munich.
This contained more than 80 oil paintings by Kandinsky, more than 300 of his works on paper, sketchbooks, prints, and reverse paintings on glass, as well as 25 paintings by Münter herself and numerous pictures by their mutual artist friends from the period before 1914.
As a Russian citizen, Kandinsky had been forced to leave Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. At this time he took only a few larger oil paintings with him and left everything else in the care of Gabriele Münter. Only in 1926 was the ownership of these remaining works legally divided between Kandinsky and his former companion. Kandinsky received, along with his books and pieces of furniture, such as the harmonium (see cat. no. 2), numerous drawings and small-format paintings, while all the remaining works entered the possession of Gabriele Münter.