The community of artists not only shared ideas, but also a deep connection to the landscape and the surroundings of Murnau. The nature, the architecture of the village and the Bavarian light inspired Jawlensky to a looser and more fluid exploration of colour and form, which he had already seen during a studio visit to Henri Matisse in Paris in 1907. Gabriele Münter wrote about their work together in 1908: »I painted together with Jawlensky, who had brought with him from France post-impressionist suggestions for immediate colour effects and powerfully condensed subject matter.

Jawlensky’s works from this period are characterised by an intense colour palette and a simplified, almost geometric formal language. The artist began to reduce the landscape to its elementary forms, resulting in a powerful, emotional expression. The colours became more two-dimensional and expressive, often in strong tones of red, blue, green and yellow.

By positioning the viewer’s gaze slightly higher in Blick auf Murnau from 1908, the artist succeeds in staggering the view of the village, which creates a perspectival surface connection. The dark contours of the individual picture compartments and the chosen detail also emphasise the spatial rhythm, which is created entirely without naturalistic shadows. The spontaneously applied brushwork sometimes appears rippled and fast, at other times soft and elongated. These developments show Jawlensky’s turn towards Expressionism, in which subjective perception and the emotional effect of colour take prominence.