By the time she was 21, the German Expressionist painter Gabriele Münter, born in Berlin in 1877, had lost both parents. She and her sister decided to travel to America, to visit family in the Midwest. After two years of exploration, Gabriele returned to Germany and began studying at Munich’s Phalanx School, where she was introduced to Post-Impressionist techniques—brush and palette knife. During this period she met Wassily Kandinsky, who became her mentor and lover. Over the next six decades, Münter created a diverse body of work. The most powerful facet of her oeuvre remained her portraits, which she sometimes executed in a muted palette, other times in the New Objectivity style. With 100 paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, this is the first retrospective that focuses entirely on her portraits. —E.C.