Together at Home: Wassily Kandinsky and Gabrielle Münter's Domestic Gesamtkunstwerk

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 Yellow Sound published in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac in 1912; he simultaneous experimented with the Gesamtkunstwerk when he began to decorate the home in Murnau in 1909. This thesis posits that Kandinsky formulated the Gesamtkunstwerk at the home in Murnau alongside Yellow Sound—which proved to be more akin to Wagner’s conception of a public Gesamtkunstwerk—thus demonstrating Kandinsky’s various 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.