Reading the Art World: Megan Fontanella
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Listen to our latest podcast episode featuring Megan Fontanella, Curator of Modern Art and Provenance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, discussing her book Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World, published by Guggenheim Museum Publications, distributed by Artbook DAP.
Fontanella reveals the career of Gabriele Münter, a pioneering German Expressionist and cofounder of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), whose bold use of color and form helped define early modernism—yet whose contributions have long been overlooked in art history. The conversation traces how Münter developed her distinctive visual language, one that sought to "convey an essence" rather than imitate reality, offering an alternative to the pure abstraction favored by many of her modernist contemporaries, including Vasily Kandinsky.
Our conversation addresses one of the most compelling aspects of Münter's legacy: her actions during World War II, when she hid major works by herself and other Blue Rider artists in the basement of her house in Murnau, Germany, protecting them from Nazi confiscation. Without her courage, a vital chapter of modern art history might have been lost. Fontanella traces Münter’s path from her early photographic experiments during travels in the United States (1898–1900) to her bold paintings that reimagined landscape, still life, and portraiture through radical simplification and color.
For anyone interested in German Expressionism, the recovery of women artists’ legacies, or the collaborative networks that shaped early 20th-century modernism, this episode offers essential insights into an artist whose vision continues to inspire—and whose work deserves far greater recognition.
The beautifully illustrated volume accompanies the first major U.S. retrospective of Münter’s work and brings new research to light through essays, archival material, and restored provenance histories.
"Focusing on Gabriele Münter, we have an opportunity to demonstrate that there are multiple modernisms—there are different ways of approaching avant-gardism and radical art that go beyond prevailing narratives that center abstraction... In Münters adherence to subject matter like a still life, or landscape, or a portrait, she was just as radical and groundbreaking."
– Megan Fontanella
About the Author
Megan Fontanella is Curator of Modern Art and Provenance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Since joining the curatorial staff in 2005, she has organized or co-organized over thirty exhibitions across the Guggenheim's museums in Bilbao, New York, Venice, and formerly Berlin. Major exhibitions include "Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle," "Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim," and "Giacometti." She is recognized as an expert in provenance research with a focus on World War II spoliation issues. Fontanella graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in art history and received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she specialized in late 19th-century French art.
About the Exhibition
Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from November 7, 2025 through April 26, 2026. The exhibition presents over fifty paintings across three Tower galleries, alongside nineteen photographs Münter captured during her extended stay in the United States. Learn more here: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/gabriele-munter