Ainmillerstraße 36: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of number 36, a solid, respectable apartment house of the kind built all over Schwabing around 1900. Nothing about it shouts revolution. And yet, from around 1908 until the summer of 1914, a flat in this house was one of the engine rooms of modern art.
Key Facts
| Place | Ainmillerstraße 36: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider |
|---|---|
| Address | Ainmillerstraße 36, 80801 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.15920, 11.57850 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of number 36, a solid, respectable apartment house of the kind built all over Schwabing around 1900. Nothing about it shouts revolution. And yet, from around 1908 until the summer of 1914, a flat in this house was one of the engine rooms of modern art.
Wassily Kandinsky lived here with the painter Gabriele Münter, his partner and former student. They were not married... he still had a wife back in Russia, which was quite enough to set Munich's tongues wagging. In the country town of Murnau, where Münter bought a house in 1909, the two of them painted the Bavarian hills in blazing, unnatural colours, and Kandinsky began to let the objects in his pictures dissolve altogether.
In 1911 the local artists' association rejected one of his enormous canvases for its winter show. So Kandinsky and his friend Franz Marc walked out and organised their own exhibition, which opened that December at Thannhauser's gallery in the city centre. They called themselves Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider. Years later Kandinsky explained the name with a shrug: they both loved blue, Marc loved horses, and he loved riders. Their almanac of 1912 put children's drawings, Bavarian paintings on glass, art from Africa and Oceania and new music by Arnold Schoenberg side by side.
Then came August 1914. As a Russian citizen, Kandinsky had to leave Germany within weeks. Marc and his friend August Macke went to war and never came back. Münter was left with a mountain of paintings. Through the Nazi years, when this art was branded degenerate, she kept them hidden in her house at Murnau... and in 1957, on her eightieth birthday, she gave them to the city's Lenbachhaus.
A few doors along, at number 32, Paul Klee lived for many years, and near the end of the First World War the poet Rainer Maria Rilke rented rooms in this same quiet street. Now carry on north to Kaiserplatz and its tall church tower.