Gabriele Munter (1877 - 1962) was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century.Gabriele Meenter was born in Berlin and showed an interest in art from a young age. She received private tuition in drawing and attended the local Women Artists School, as she was unable to enroll in the German art academies because she was a woman. Meenter left Berlin to attend the progressive Phalanx School in Munich. There she studied sculpture, printmaking and painting and in 1902 began a very intimate and personal relationship with the School director Wassily Kandinsky; they were later engaged to be married. In 1911 they founded the avant-garde expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group.During World War I the couple left Germany to take refuge in Switzerland, but since Kandinsky was Russian he was forced to return to Moscow in 1914. He divorced and remarried while in Russia and never saw Meenter again. She returned to Germany following the war but was relatively inactive in the arts again until the 1920s.
During World War II she hid Kandinsky works and those of other members of the Blue Rider from the Nazis. She died in 1962 in Murnau am Staffelsee.
