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Acknowledgements © COPYRIGHT by Kelley Daley 2015 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED To my parents for supporting me and to Remy, for making it entertaining. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Juliet Bellow and Dr. Andrea Pearson, who served as advisors for my M.A. thesis project. From the inception of the idea in Dr. Bellow’s Expressionism course, to travelling to Murnau to see the house, and final publication as a M.A. thesis, both Dr. Bellow and Dr. Pearson generously offered their time, assistance and continual encouragement. I would also like to thank the wonderful, strong, intelligent women (and man) in the American University Art History department for providing suggestions, edits, and humor. ii TOGETHER AT HOME: WASSILY KANDINSKY AND GABRIELE MÜNTER’S DOMESTIC GESAMTKUNSTWERK BY Kelley Daley ABSTRACT This thesis project investigates the correspondences between the domestic residence of Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in Murnau, Germany, from 1909 – 1914 and Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk. I focus on Kandinsky’s designs for the house, tracing his adaptation of Wagner’s theory, and late-nineteenth-century versions of Wagner’s imagined total work of art, to the domestic realm. Scholars often argue that Kandinsky’s first experimentation with Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk was with his stage composition The Yellow Sound, which he began to write in 1909 and published in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac in 1912, the same years that he lived in and decorated the home in Murnau. This thesis posits that Kandinsky worked on two Gesamtkunstwerke simultaneously, the home in Murnau and The Yellow Sound, two different iterations or manifestations of Wagner’s theory. Through an analysis of the house and its connections to a wide range of precedents, and to works Kandinsky made while living there, this thesis provides a deeper understanding of this early period in Kandinsky’s career, which is often regarded as mere precursor for the abstract work he began to produce in the mid-1910s. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ ii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .......................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 THE ADAPTABLE GESAMTKUNSTWERK: WAGNER AND LATE- NINETEENTH-CENTURY WAGNERISMS ................................................................... 7 Wagner’s Utopian Social Vision ........................................................................................ 8 The British Arts and Crafts Movement: Dissolving Artistic Hierarchies ......................... 10 Jugendstil: The Unity of Arts and Crafts and Communities ............................................. 12 French Symbolism: Poetry and Musical Correspondences .............................................. 14 The Nabis: Intimacy and the Gesamtkunstwerk ............................................................... 18 CHAPTER 2 TO MURNAU VIA MOSCOW: RUSSIAN INFLUENCES ON KANDINSKY’S GESAMTKUNSTWERK ..................................................................... 22 From Moscow to St. Petersburg ....................................................................................... 23 Ethnographic Research and the Fairy-Tale Paintings ....................................................... 30 CHAPTER 3 MURNAU: ARRIVING AT THE DOMESTIC GESAMTKUNSTWERK ......... 34 Diverse Collections: Creating Unity and Totality ............................................................ 37 Utopian Iconographic Imagery ......................................................................................... 39 Unifying Ornamental decoration ...................................................................................... 43 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 48 ILLUSTRATIONS ....................................................................................................................... 50 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 52 iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration Figure 1: Murnau House, Murnau Germany, Daley personal photograph ................................... 50 Figure 2: Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky working in the garden in Murnau, c. 1910-11. ............... 50 Figure 3: Hermann Obrist, Cyclamen, 1892 ................................................................................. 50 Figure 4: Wassily Kandinsky, cover of Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, Woodblock print, 1912 ...... 50 Figure 5: Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de vivre, Oil on canvas, Barnes Foundation, 1905-1906. 50 Figure 6: Edouard Vuillard, Desmarais Panels: Nursemaids and Children in a Public Park, Oil on panel, Private Collection, 1892. ................................................................................... 50 Figure 7: Elena Polenova, Painted cupboard, 1885 ...................................................................... 50 Figure 8: Wassily Kandinsky, Painted cupboard, 1902-1908 ....................................................... 50 Figure 9: Viktor Gartman, Studio at Abramtsevo, 1873 ............................................................... 50 Figure 10: Wassily Kandinsky, Arrival of the Merchants, Tempera on canvas, Miyagi Museum of Art, Japan, 1905 ............................................................................................................ 50 Figure 11: Wassily Kandinsky, Song of the Volga, Tempera on cardboard, Centre Georges Poompidou, Paris, 1906 .................................................................................................... 50 Figure 12: Wassily Kandinsky, Decorative border, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photography, 1902-1908 ................................................................................................... 50 Figure 13: Painted armoire, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ............................... 50 Figure 14: Above Gabriele Munter’s bed, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ........ 50 Figure 15: Three drawer dresser, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ...................... 50 Figure 16: Wassily Kandinsky, Riding Couple, Tempera on canvas, Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1906 ........................................................................................................................................... 50 Figure 17: Female on bookcase, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ....................... 50 Figure 18: Wassily Kandinsky, Motley Life, Tempera on canvas, Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1907 . 50 Figure 19: Painted staircase, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ............................. 50 Figure 20: Kandinsky’s painted desk, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ............... 51 v Figure 21: Detail of Kandinsky’s painted desk, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph 51 Figure 22: Ornamental design in living room, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph .. 51 Figure 23: Gabriele Munter’s Toilette, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ............. 51 Figure 24: Gabriele Munter’s chair, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph .................. 51 Figure 25: Gabriele Munter’s table, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph .................. 51 Figure 26: Painted mural in Kandinsky’s bedroom, Murnau, Germany, Daley personal photograph ........................................................................................................................ 51 vi INTRODUCTION This thesis focuses on the influence of Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) on the house in Murnau Germany that Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter decorated and used as a live-work space [fig.1]. The decision to implement Wagner’s ideas in the domestic sphere constitutes a break from the original conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk. For Wagner, the natural “home” of the Gesamtkunstwerk was lyric drama, or opera, performed in a public setting. Conceived in the wake of the 1848 revolution, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk used art as an instrument for social cohesion: this unified artwork modeled an ideal community, and helped an actual community to come into being as its audience. The question then remains, why did Kandinsky and Münter utilize a private home as the site for a Gesamtkunstwerk? I argue that Kandinsky and Münter hoped to make the house a Gesamtkunstwerk as a model of, and a vehicle for, a utopian community they hoped to bring into being. Located in the market town of Murnau, the cottage sits on top of a hill over-looking the town and the Bavarian Alps. Kandinsky and Münter lived there on and off from 1909 until 1914 at the onset of World War I. In the home, they experimented with hinterglasmalerei (reverse glass painting); exhibited a range of objects collected from their travels; implemented a decorative program throughout the home, painting the walls and the furniture; and acted out a “Bavarian peasant” lifestyle, dressing in clothing typical of local inhabitants [fig. 2]. The house functioned as the center for a variety of intimate utopian communities. It served as the founding location of the artists’
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