INSPIRATION POINTS : Places where you can still see the scenes that fired the imaginations of visionary artists : GERMANY’S ‘BLUE COUNTRY’

MURNAU, Germany —  Hidden among the crisp green fields and polished villages in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the “Blue Country” is partly a landscape of the imagination.

Although less than an hour’s drive south of Munich, it can only really be reached by traveling back nearly 90 years to a time when horses were more reliable than cars and a farmhouse could be rented for less than $2 a month.

In a brief period before World War I, this quiet farming region was the scene of a frenzy of creativity that resulted in one of the leading art movements of the 20th century: “Der Blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider).

The movement included the gifted painters, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter, Alexei Jawlensky, August Macke and Paul Klee. It challenged traditional notions of art, and the artists’ radical, abstract work helped pave the way for Modernism.

While Munich was the epicenter of the informal movement, Murnau was its spiritual base. Key members lived in the area, and the work they produced here, between 1908 and 1914, was at the forefront of the European avant-garde movement in the arts.

Marc, a Bavarian artist famous for his paintings of animals, found continual inspiration in Murnau’s forests, mountains and marshes. The color blue held special significance for him. He once said, “Blue is the only color that gives me a permanently good feeling.” It was he who described the Murnau countryside as the “Blue Country.”

Today, the cobblestone streets of Murnau lie under asphalt, and the growing market town sprawls out from the old center into the surrounding farmlands. But it is possible to glimpse the spirit of the Blue Rider in the gaps of modernity.

Since 1978, a regular weekend tour has allowed participants to rediscover the Blue Country. Titled On the Trail of the Blue Rider and organized by the local tourist board, the tour takes visitors to where the Blue Rider artists lived, worked and argued, to the beer gardens where they drank, and to the landscapes they rambled through and painted.

I first heard of Kandinsky’s and Munter’s life in Murnau during a first-year fine arts lecture at a university in Australia. Unlike all the knowledge that sieved through my memory, that particular grain of information lodged, but I little imagined that 10 years later, in June 1994, I would actually be sitting inside the Murnau Community Center listening to another lecture on the topic.

It was 10 a.m. on the first day of the two-day tour; the introductory lecture on Murnau and the Blue Rider (with slides) had just begun. The lecture was in German but an English text was provided, so I followed along without bothering my German wife for a translation.

With us on the tour were a young couple from France, the owner of a private gallery from Munich and her boyfriend, an art student from Hamburg, and a group from the Cologne Kunstfreundeskries (art appreciation society). “All types come on the weekends, including professional art historians and gallery directors who know far more about the Blue Rider than we do,” Fritz-Walter Schmidt, the Murnau tourist office director, told me later. “But we know about Murnau and its circumstances before World War I, and this is what we show them. It is one thing to know a painting and how it was created, but it is another to see the view that inspired it. For some people this is a revelation.”

The Blue Rider’s association with Murnau began in June 1908, when the Russian painter Kandinsky, accompanied by Munter, his German lover and fellow painter, visited the town. The couple was immediately captivated by the bright colors of the town and the rhythms of the surrounding landscape, which include the tranquil Lake Staffel (Staffelsee) and the rugged Wetterstein Mountains. They returned later that summer to paint with two Russian friends, Marianne von Werefkin and Jawlensky.

Mnter later wrote in her diary in 1911: “It was a beautiful, interesting, joyous time of work with many discussions about art. . . All four of us were keenly ambitious, and each of us made progress. . . We all worked very hard. Since then, Kandinsky’s work has progressed miraculously.” The area so inspired the artists that, in the following year, Munter bought a small house on a hill opposite Murnau, so that she and Kandinsky could continue to live and work there. Jawlensky and von Werefkin visited often, as did other painters who were later to band together as the Blue Rider.

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We visited the house, which long ago ceased to be the only building in Kottmullerallee, on the tour’s second morning. The small villa has been turned into a museum and it affords an insight into the life of Munter and Kandinsky. Kandinsky fell in love with the villa at first sight and pressured Munter to buy it. During their years together, Munter and Kandinsky worked on the house and garden, painting the furniture with motifs inspired by naive art, and adorning the walls and tables with religious folk art and local handicrafts. While both Kandinsky and Munter had private incomes, Kandinsky, in particular, enjoyed growing vegetables and fruit in their garden. While staying in Murnau, he even adopted the customs and costumes of the Bavarian peasantry.

The original stairs and furniture are still adorned with Kandinsky’s folk-art designs. The upstairs bedroom is preserved almost exactly as it appears in Munter’s 1910 painting “Interior.” One difference is a large easel with an unfinished canvas that has been mounted by the window. Here Munter and Kandinsky often sat drawing the view. I looked out the small window to the Murnau skyline, which regularly appeared in their paintings. It remains largely unchanged, still dominated as it is by the spire of the baroque Pfarrkirche St. Niklaus (the town church), dating back to 1734, and the Murnauer Castle, which dates back to 1220.

Murnau is now a modern country town of 10,500 people wrapped around a well-preserved core. While town records date back to the 12th century, fire regularly destroyed Murnau (every 100 years on average). Many of the notable buildings--the churches and the castle for example--were saved, but most of the private housing dates from the early 19th century.

While popular with Bavarians because of its tranquillity, its accessibility to the Alps, and variety of outdoor activities, Murnau remains off the main tourist trail. Visitors are unlikely to see locals dressed in lederhosen or dirndls (except on festival days). They will, however, discover a town little changed since the Blue Rider time. It’s still possible, as we did, to eat and drink at the Gasthof Griesbrau, where Munter and Kandinsky stayed when they first visited Murnau. Or to visit the Ahndl beer garden, where the artists spent warm summer evenings.

Murnau was decisive in the development of Kandinsky, the painter most strongly linked to the birth of abstract art. It’s ironic that a place of such classic beauty was the birthplace of abstraction. As the view from the Munter House and comparisons to his earlier work show, Kandinsky’s Murnau landscapes gradually blurred the appearance of reality until, by 1913, he produced what is considered the first free-form, non-objective art of the new century.

Kandinsky’s Murnau work proved too radical for the Neue Kunstler Vereinigung (New Artists Assn.), an earlier Munich avant-garde artist group of which he was a founding member. So he, Munter and Marc (who lived five miles away in the small village of Sindelsdorf), organized their own exhibition in December 1911: the first public appearance of the Blue Rider.

“We made up the name ‘Blue Rider’ over coffee in the leafy garden arcade at Sindelsdorf,” Kandinsky later recalled. “Both of us loved blue . . . the name emerged automatically.”

The Blue Rider eventually expanded to include Heinrich Campendonk, who had moved to Sindelsdorf in October 1911, Paul Klee, August Macke, Alfred Kubin and the American Lyonel Feininger, as well as other major artists. Although the group only lasted two years, its exhibitions, publications and aesthetic theories sparked controversy throughout the art world and greatly influenced the art of our time.

Curiously, Murnau has been slow to embrace its Blue Rider legacy. The Munter House only became a museum in 1983, long after all of Munter’s and Kandinsky’s Murnau works had been donated to the Lenbachhaus Gallery in Munich, which has the world’s premier collection of works by the Blue Rider.

Even today, Murnau is refreshingly free of Blue Rider cafes and Gabriele Munter boutiques. Perhaps this is due to the unaffected, easy-going attitudes of the locals, but it seems to betray an indifference on Murnau’s part to its Blue Rider history.

This attitude has begun to change with the recent conversion of Murnauer Castle into a gallery/museum that honors the Blue Rider, as well as other renowned local artists such as glass-painter Heinrich Rambold and the author Odin von Horvath, whose work “The Italian Night,” was critical of the Nazis in the 1930s.

Joachim Giessler, a designer and the other organizer of the Blue Rider weekend, must be, in part, credited with this new awareness of the town’s artistic past. In 1978, his investigation into Murnau’s Blue Rider heritage resulted in an exhibition of photographs that compared Murnau landscapes with landscape paintings by Blue Rider members.

“See that corner over there,” Schmidt said to me, pointing at an uninspiring fork in the road during our Sunday morning “On the Trail.” “Forget the TV antennas, ignore the cars and imagine a large hedge just here.” Then he pulled out a color reproduction of a Kandinsky painting depicting the same corner. The mundane street scene was transformed by Kandinsky into an inspiring, spontaneous personal vision.

During the tour, motifs that appear regularly in the artists’ work gradually reveal themselves: the Staffelsee, the Kochel cemetery and the Murnau marsh with its small lakes.

Blue Rider era ended wtih WWI when Macke was killed in the trenches of France and the Russians--von Werefkin, Jawlensky and Kandinsky--were forced to flee.

Before leaving, Kandinsky promised to return and marry Munter. However, in 1917, he married Nina Andrejewski--and Munter’s world collapsed. She gave up painting and led a nomadic, unsettled life before returning to Murnau in 1931. She took up painting again, weathered the Nazi years that labeled the art of many of her Blue Rider colleagues as “degenerate,” and lived there until her death in 1962.

World War I also shattered the Murnau idyll of Franz Marc. He was called up in August 1914 and was to see his new house in Reid only once more, on leave from the front. He died in Verdun on March 4, 1916, and was buried in Kochel cemetery in his beloved Blue Country.

The tour ended at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Those who had a long way to travel left immediately, but the others stayed on and accompanied Schmidt for a half an hour ramble through the marsh to the Ahndl beer garden. The marsh was then awash in dark green shadows. As we sat there--each with a foaming mug of Bavarian beer in hand--staring at the panoramic view of the Alps, my wife commented, “Now I know what it means to be blue--in a happy way.”

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GUIDEBOOK: Bavarian Hospitality

Getting there: Lufthansa, United and Delta offer one-stop, connecting service to Munich from LAX, starting at $1,027 round trip, advance ticket purchase. Murnau is a 40-mile bus ride from Munich.

Staying there: Gasthof Griesbrau, Obermarkt 37; hotel where Munter and Kandinsky, von Werefkin and Jawlensky stayed when they first visited Murnau. Hotel is well-located, and still provides reasonable and comfortable rooms starting from $58; tel. 011-49-8841-1422, fax 011-49-8841-3913.

Hotel Alpenhof, Ramsachstrasse 8; a more luxurious modern hotel on the edge of one of Europe’s largest nature preserves. Prices from $116-$218 for a double and $95-$145 for a single; tel. 011-49-8841-4910, fax 011-49-8841-5438.

Hotel Klausenhof, Burgraben 8-10; a relaxed German-style hotel with attached beer garden. Double rooms $90-$130; singles $60-$87; tel. 011-49-8841-61160, fax 011-49-8841-5043.

Where to eat: Gasthof Karg “Braustuber!” Untermarkt 27; traditional Bavarian meal of Schweinshax’n and Knodel for $13. Most meals between $7-$14; local tel. 08841-8272.

Gasthof Griesbrau, Obermarkt 37; meals for between $7-$21. Fish a speciality; tel. 08841-1422, fax 08841-3913.

Gasthof Alter Wirt, Untermarkt 12, 15-35DM for a main meal, speciality is Schlemmerpl atte Alter Wirt, baked mixed fillets, rice and potatoes for $38 for two; tel. 08841-1434.

Blue Rider tour: On the Trail of the Blue Rider is held on the first and third weekends of April, May, June, September and October. Two-day tour, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m.-3 p.m. on Sunday. It costs $175, including two nights’ accommodations in a middle-class hotel, breakfasts, lunches and entrance fees. Cost is $62 without accommodations. Arrival on Friday night.

Book at least one month in advance. The tour is in German; English text of the introductory lecture-slide show is provided. Guides will provide a commentary in both languages.

For more information: Verkehrsamt Murnau (tourist office), Kohlgruberstrasse 1; tel. 011-49-8841-61410, fax 011-49-8841-3491.

German National Tourist Office, 11766 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 750, Los Angeles, CA 90025; tel. (310) 575-9799, fax (310) 575-1565.

--G.L.