Despite being raised in a country that discouraged women from careers in art, Gabriele Münter became a founding member of one of the most influential early-20th-century modernist movements: German expressionism.

Born in Berlin, Münter began drawing as a child. Because women were not allowed to enroll in the official German academies, she received private lessons and attended classes at the local Women Artists' School. Dissatisfied with its curriculum, Münter began attending Munich's progressive new Phalanx School, where she studied sculpture, woodcut techniques and painting. In 1902 Münter began a 12-year professional and personal relationship with the Phalanx School's director, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Together they traveled extensively and in 1908 fell in love with the village of Murnau in the lake district of southern Bavaria. Münter later bought a house there, where she spent much of her life. The next year, Münter helped establish the Munich-based avant-garde group Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artists' Association), and in 1911 she, Kandinsky, and several other artists left that group to form Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), an important expressionist organization.

During World War I, Münter and Kandinsky went to neutral Switzerland, but, as a Russian national, Kandinsky was considered an enemy alien, so he returned to Moscow in 1914. Shortly thereafter, Kandinsky obtained a divorce from his wife and, instead of marrying Münter, in 1916 he wed Nina Andreyevskaya, whom he had met in Russia. Münter never saw him again.

After a period of relative inactivity, Münter, back in Germany, returned to painting seriously in the late 1920s. Despite the limitations imposed on her as a radical artist working during the Nazi era, Münter continued producing landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and interior scenes in a vividly colored, highly stylized manner similar to the one she had developed early in her career.