Gabriele Münter was one of the charter members of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a German expressionist group founded in 1911 that was united not by style but by the shared desire to convey spirituality and transcendence through art. In 1908 Münter settled in the town of Murnau, near Munich, where she envisioned a utopian community of artists living outside the context of urban life. For Münter, the rural landscape allowed for an expression of spiritual purity, a dominant theme in her art.
