Old Master & Mistress

Unlike poor Vincent van Gogh, who left his unsold paintings to his family only to have more than 500 of them disappear through carelessness and neglect, Abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky was a lucky man. He left a huge legacy of his work to his former mistress, and they survived world wars, revolutions, putsches, even the fury of a woman scorned. The woman scorned was Gabriele Munter, Kandinsky's mistress for more than 13 years, who never once looked at the pictures the old master left with her in 1914. Last month, on her 80th birthday, frail, white-haired Gabriele turned the whole collection (valued at $500,000) over to the city of Munich. Last week, unrelenting to the end, she refused to visit the exhibition at the Municipal Gallery, which included some of her own work.

But others rushed to see what neither public nor experts had ever seen before. The walls of the gallery were covered with 120 oils and oil sketches, nearly 100 watercolors and drawings, scores of lithographs and etchings. The result was like a window on the birth of abstract art. The early canvases--impressionist landscapes, academic portraits, saccharine fairy-tale scenes--gave little hint of the revolutionary innovations to come. But suddenly (1908) the Bavarian countryside is seen in patches of fiery yellows, blues and greens. By 1910 color is triumphing over form, as a church steeple sways insanely in a polychromatic storm. Then, in the first modern, purely nonobjective paintings (1911), there emerges a separate world of Kandinsky's own, having nothing to do with external reality--a world made up of a vast orchestration of colors, exploding with light, air, energy, catapulting out of the canvases.

Every Day a Festival. When Gabriele Munter first met Kandinsky in Munich at the beginning of the century, she was a sad-faced girl with brown hair and big eyes, who longed to paint. Kandinsky, who at 30 with his young wife had fled a dull job as an economics professor in Russia, was already the leader of a group of independent artists, and taught painting at their school. Gabriele became his favorite student. He kept her after class, took her on painting jaunts. The following year they left on a five-year tour of Europe and North, Africa.

In Paris they met Matisse and the other Fauves, the "Wild Beasts" who revolted against impressionism. When they returned to Munich in 1908, they settled in an apartment in suburban Schwabing, which became the headquarters of the Munich Fauves. Paul Klee lived two houses away, and near by were Alfred Kubin, Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky, August Macke. In painting excursions through southern Bavaria, Kandinsky and Gabriele discovered the village of Murnau, where they bought a house, called to this day the Russenhaus, with a fine view of the Alpine foothills. Kandinsky held court there too. "Every day is like a festival," Macke wrote. "At Kandinsky's we laugh all the time. He laughs like an ancient Greek, so loud and free, really Homeric."

The Blue Horses. As Kandinsky developed from his Fauve to his abstract period, conservatives in his group rebelled. Kandinsky, Gabriele, Marc and Kubin walked out on them, soon to be joined by Jawlensky, Campendonck, Klee and Composer Arnold Schoenberg, who at the time fancied himself a painter. They formed der Blaue Reiter group. The name was thought up by Kandinsky and Marc over a cup of coffee. "We both loved blue," Kandinsky later recalled. "Marc loved horses, I loved riders. So the name came naturally."

After launching abstract painting, the group was quickly broken up when the war came in 1914 and Kandinsky had to leave Germany. At first Gabriele joined him in neutral Switzerland. But when he went to Moscow, she returned to Munich, and the end came in 1916 after a final three months together in Stockholm. Gabriele's black mood was reflected in the bleak, burnt-out landscapes she painted on the ship going home. One year after Kandinsky left her, by then divorced from his first wife, he married the daughter of a Russian general; he survived the Communist Revolution, finally moved to Paris, where he painted his most lyrical and tightly composed abstractions, and where he died in 1944.

Gabriele kept all the paintings Kandinsky had left with her, hiding them in Munich in storage during the first years of the Hitler regime when the Nazis wanted to burn them as decadent, and later building a storage room in the cellar of the Russenhaus, where the paintings remained until they were delivered to the Munich gallery. Last week, beyond one tight-lipped admission ("He was very aristocratic"), she refused to talk about Kandinsky. A brittle octogenarian with startlingly candid eyes and a gentle face, Gabriele still lives in the Russenhaus. The wooden staircase was decorated long ago by the man whose pictures she refuses to look at, and every time she passes, her eyes fall upon his jolly yellow and violet riders galloping gaily among the stylized flowers.

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