Strawberries in Murnau

Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table in the Murnau House, 1912. oil on canvas

see: Gabriele Münter and Vasily Kandinsky, 1902-14: A Life in Photographs

on view at the Guggenheim Museum

as part of the Kandinsky focus show.

I’m trying to make sense of a thread of correspondences written one unseasonably hot summer in 1911. The place is Murnau, a rustic village in Bavaria, Germany. An artist has arrived to the house after an extended visit with family and relatives in Moscow and Odessa. She is not there, and so thus begins the chain of correspondence:

Well, sailed in today with pile of luggage (porter Lobl). It was very hot, unusual even for Murnau. Went into the garden at once & ate a few strawberries. Then had tea and bared my knees—splendid. Then back into the garden. And this is how things stand. Not one berry has been stolen (i.e. not even red currants etc.) The strawberries look as if splashed with thick daubs of blood. The biggest one today was like this (here, Kandinsky inserted a drawing)…the bed positively glows—even from afar there must be hundreds in there…

Wassily Kandinsky begins a long line of correspondence with his lover, Gabriele Münter, who cannot join him in Murnau, in the house that she bought, due to obligatory family affairs. I am skimming through these letters for any hint of the significance that this place had for the artist, who over the course of five years, 1908 to 1913, painted many landscapes of the small village he had called ‘home”. One theme constantly appears in Kandinsky’s letters—the garden, with its growing crops of raspberries, cherries, and gooseberries, its potatoes, radishes, lettuce, and spinach, and most importantly, strawberries...