Man reading a newspaper, February 12, 1926 "In the decade between 1920 and 1930, I did not have a productive time for painting. I lived here and there, sometimes in my house in Murnau, sometimes in guest rooms, sometimes as a guest of friends and relatives. For years I had no studio. The sketchbook was my friend, and the drawings were the reflection of my visual experiences. At that time, people were what interested me most. At concerts, at the table, on the train, I observed them and mostly drew them in secret. [...] The sketches, when they arose in happy moments, were completed immediately. They contained what I had to say and needed nothing else to be a picture.” One such sketchy picture, as described by Gabriele Münter in the quote we have just heard, is the “Man Reading a Newspaper” from 1926. Like many other drawings from the 1920s, it only reveals an inner attitude or mood upon closer inspection. With his legs crossed, a man sits slightly at an angle in a wide armchair, leaning on the armrests, engrossed in reading the newspaper. The newspaper largely covers his body, and his face is only visible from his nose upwards. The concentrated gaze through the glasses seems to be focused on what he is reading. With concise, descriptive lines without any internal drawing or shading, Münter outlines this observation, or the “visual experience”, as she calls it. The broken line suggests more than it actually shows; the art of omission allows Münter, especially in her drawings, to skillfully capture the essential and reduce it to a few characters. In 1952, Münter wrote about this: “The drawing in itself is already a clear transformation of reality. It lifts the essential more freely out of the mass of impressions and presents it more sharply; in short, it is more abstract in its statement.” Just as the man behind the newspaper has withdrawn from his surroundings, his physicality remains trapped within the closed outline and is closed off from the view from outside. Münter sensitively captures this situation and gives it expression with her own mischievousness through an almost imperceptible emphasis.