LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery presents Gabriele M黱ter - The Search for Expression 1906-1917, on view through September 11, 2005. Gabriele M黱ter (1877-1962) played a vital role in the development of German Expressionism in the early years of the 20th century. She was at the forefront of a group of highly influential avant-garde artists, including her lover Wassily Kandinsky, who redirected the course of German modernism and shaped Expressionist aesthetics. M黱ter was a founder member both of the progressive, Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen, (Munich New Artists’ Association) and the celebrated avant-garde group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

Gabriele M黱ter: The Search For Expression 1906-1917 is the first ever museum exhibition of M黱ter’s work in Britain and features 20 important paintings from the most intensively creative period of her career. The exhibition shows a small number of works from British private collections but the majority of paintings have been selected from the outstanding collections of the St鋎tische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, to which M黱ter bequeathed her estate in 1957 and which houses the finest collection of Blaue Reiter paintings in the world. Several of these loans to the Courtauld are masterpieces of M黱ter’s oeuvre and some have never been shown outside Germany before.

This exhibition charts M黱ter’s extraordinary artistic development from her early Impressionist-inspired paintings of S鑦res on the outskirts of Paris, to the bold and brightly coloured innovative Expressionist works she produced in the small town of Murnau, deep in the Bavarian Alps. It was here, accompanied by Kandinsky and fellow painters Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, that the foundations of the Blaue Reiter movement were laid. The paintings in the exhibition show how M黱ter thoroughly revitalised the genres of portraiture, landscape and still life, achieving a distinct voice within both her immediate circle and the wider European avant-garde.

The exhibition includes work from the First World War period when the Blaue Reiter was forced to disband and M黱ter, now separated from Kandinsky, produced a series of haunting and melancholic portraits of women in interiors, the most important examples of which are on display.

The range and diversity of the paintings shown in this exhibition demonstrate that M黱ter’s work never solidified into a stylistic formula but was always searching. As she put it, “When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim.”

Gabriele M黱ter: The Search For Expression 1906-1917 will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with essays by Dr Shulamith Behr from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Dr Annegret Hoberg from the Lenbachhaus.