District Administrator Anton Speer identifies him immediately. “Here comes Kandinsky,” he says, as a chic intellectual with sharp facial features, piercing, bespectacled eyes and delicately spread fingers enters the garden of the Münter-Haus in Murnau. Only the chic knickerbocker suit that the actor Vladimir Burlakov is wearing doesn’t quite fit into the garden in which the painter once let his partner Gabriele Münter photograph him with leather jackets and a spade. By the way, Münter is still a bit of a wait. Because actress Vanessa Loibl, who mimicked the almost 65-year-old Münter for the shoot in the morning, first has to get rid of the age mask and transform herself back into the young, deeply serious-looking artist.
Actually, it’s amazing that so far there hasn’t been a movie about the extraordinary couple. Not only because the two wrote art history as co-founders of the Blaue Reiters, but also because there is so much love, passion, coldness and hate in their ambivalent relationship that it would easily be enough for a four-hour strip. The film that director Marcus O. Rosenmüller is shooting shouldn’t last that long. He is fascinated by the couple’s artistic symbiosis. “Both of them really rocked artistically, especially during their time in Murnau.”
The relationship was definitely artistically fruitful, but it only functioned without tension in rare moments – preferably when travelling. Münter bought the house in Murnau in 1909, partly because the often depressed Kandinsky felt comfortable there. The film crew is only allowed to shoot in the garden, not in the rooms – the risk of damaging anything is too great.
That’s why producer Alice Brauner had the rooms in the CCC film studios in Berlin-Spandau, once founded by her father Artur “Atze” Brauner, rebuilt true to the original. Dining area, Herrgottswinkel, living room including paintings and the famous figurines – everything corresponds to historical reality. “We try to be as precise as possible in the story at every point,” says Brauner. This is also ensured by their competent specialist advice: Annegret Hoberg, long-standing curator at the Lenbachhaus and specialist for the Blue Rider.
“We try to be as precise as possible in the story at every point,” says producer and screenwriter Alice Brauner (left, here with actress Marianne Säbringen).
(Photo: CCC Cinema and Television)
But of course: “Where there are gaps in the story, you have to fictionalize them,” says Brauner. So the first scene is fiction, in which actor Bruno Eyron knocks as “Herr Jäger” from the Reichskunstkammer at Münter’s door to look for “degenerate art”. The real Nazis weren’t on Münter’s radar screen, their names weren’t on the lists that the National Socialists used to put together the “Degenerate Art” show.
The discrimination against male colleagues, which Münter so often sharply criticized, turned out to be an advantage for the first time. Because this inconspicuousness enabled her to hide the early work of her former partner and paintings of other Blaue Reiter in the “cellar of millions” of her house in Murnau. The American soldiers, who actually searched the house several times in 1945, found nothing. “All the soldiers’ snoopers stupidly walked past the depot door. No one has noticed them yet…”, Münter noted. The fact that she never sold a Kandinsky, even though she had hardly any money and often paid with her paintings, makes her very special and shows a lot of respect.
The main actors Vanessa Loibl and Vladimir Burlakov in front of the gazebo next to the Münter House in Murnau.
(Photo: CCC Cinema and Television)
Brauner also wrote the screenplay, drawing on the unlikely couple’s correspondence, diaries and writings. She developed the idea during the pandemic, a time when she traveled a lot in the area and got to know Murnau and Münter better. The Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation was initially rather reserved about their enthusiasm. “For some, film is not yet an art form,” says Brauner.
But she managed to convince the foundation of the project, also because the political scientist and managing director of CCC Filmkunst can already show a whole series of extraordinary films. “I discussed the script page by page with the experts,” says Brauner. “We don’t stylize her as a heroic heroine”. Although Münter was emancipated, she wanted a middle-class life and marriage to Kandinsky.
The film is slated to hit theaters in Spring 2024
The years together ended with the First World War, which forced the Russian Kandinsky to emigrate. At their last meeting in Stockholm in March 1916, he promised Münter that he would come back in the fall and by then also get the marriage papers. “This is a key moment for me,” says Brauner. From then on, the relationship became toxic, culminating in a hateful guerrilla war when Kandinsky demanded the return of his paintings through third parties in 1922.
“In many eyes I was just an unnecessary addition to Kandinsky,” Gabriele Münter wrote in her diary in 1926. If anyone still believes that: The film “Münter & Kandinsky”, which will be released in the cinemas in spring 2024, should correct the impression in the long term.