Transcript:
Megan Fontanella: This painting is Gabriele Münter “Still Life with Queen” an oil on canvas from 1912. Gabriele Münter often combined unrelated objects from her private world in her paintings, as in the “Still Life with a Floating Puppet”, her Queen, and framed behind a vase of flowers. Gifted to her by the Russian dancer Alexander Sakharov, the puppet takes on a life like presence. Without that context, however, viewers may not immediately recognize the figure as a puppet. Instead reading it as disproportionately small beside the bouquet of flowers. Such deliberate dissonances, slippages between artifact and human were characteristic of Gabriele Münter’s practice. The artist Vasily Kandinsky observed that her uneven translation of objects in one in the same painting helped her to achieve a “strong, complicated inner resonance.”
“Still Life with Queen” entered the Art Institute of Chicago's holdings in 1931 through the Distinguished modern Art collection of Arthur Jerome Eddy. It was therefore among the first of Münter’s works to appear in a US private collection by 1914, and later in a museum collection
