Although Meerson was a pupil of Wassily Kandinsky at the Munich Phalanx School at the same time as Gabriele Münter, continued her training a few years later in Paris with Henri Matisse and finally married into the upper middle-class Munich Pringsheim family, her artistic work and her widely ramified life paths are barely tangible today.
The Schloßmuseum Murnau has therefore embarked on a meticulous search for traces and in this exhibition provides an insight into the work and network of an artist who, like Gabriele Münter, began as a painting student in Munich.
Olga Meerson's traces lead from Anton Azbes' painting school and the Ladies' Academy of the Künstlerinnenverein to the Phalanx School in Kochel and Kallmünz and on to Matisse in Paris and Collioure. In 1907 Münter, Kandinsky and Meerson met once again in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres. In 1911, Matisse and Meerson painted portraits of each other in Collioure, which bear witness to their deep friendship. After Olga Meerson married Heinz Pringsheim, Thomas Mann's brother-in-law, in 1912, they moved to Berlin in 1913. There, in 1922, Meerson took part in an exhibition of Russian artists at the Gutenberg bookshop together with Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Genin, Nikolai Iszelenov and Maria Lagorio, where she also showed her Matisse portrait. Only eight years later, she took her own life in Berlin at the age of 47. A comprehensive catalog will be published with previously unpublished documents and photographs from private collections as well as specialist articles that are knowledgeably dedicated to the stages of Olga Meerson's life in Russia, Germany and France. The exhibition and catalog are sponsored by the Förderkreis Schloßmuseum Murnau and the Antonie-Zauner-Stiftung.
April 11 to November 9, 2025
www.schlossmuseum-murnau.de
www.tourismus-murnau.de
