"Hey, what do you think of woodcuts? Are you interested? Don't you want to try? It's really something fine." As early as 1903, Kandinsky urged Gabriele Münter in a letter to do more graphic work in order to try out the representation of nature in the juxtaposition of surfaces. Compared to painting, printmaking is much more abstract, as its technique is mainly determined by lines and brightness values. In addition, the material, in this case lino, is much harder to work with than a canvas with a brush and offers hardly any possibilities for correction. This also forces you to concentrate on the essentials. Gabriele Münter usually made preliminary drawings. These offered her precise instructions for cutting into the printing plate. So it is not surprising that she worked abstractly in her graphic work much earlier than in painting, where she was still committed to the post-impressionist technique at the time. Woodcuts had experienced a renaissance since the discovery of Japanese cutting techniques in the mid-19th century. From Paris, inspired by Félix Vallotton and Paul Gauguin, it quickly spread to Munich. This development did not go unnoticed by Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. During a stay in France from 1906 to 1907, Gabriele Münter produced a large part of her graphic work, including this portrait of her long-time companion. Against a predominantly green background, entirely divided into large, black-bordered areas, Kandinsky looks directly at us through his oval glasses. A small shadow lies over the right side of his face, caused by the slightly turned-away posture. The white mouthpiece of his tobacco pipe flashes out from the right corner of his mouth. The slightly shadowed right side of the face and the bright white stand-up collar emphasize the special importance of the face. In contrast to this is the flat design of the tie, jacket and background. The background, which in other Parisian portraits is either designed by vertical lines or by narrative scenes, is left uncertain here. It is not clear whether this is an abstractly dissolved landscape or an ornamentally designed mural. A masterful portrait in which Gabriele Münter shows her full skill!