Mary “Peetie” Basson serves as a Docent at the Milwaukee Art Museum that houses the largest collection of paintings by Gabriele Münter in North America. A gift of Mrs. Harry L. Bradley, the fourteen paintings by Münter form a cornerstone of the museum’s German Expressionist collection. Immersed in researching the book, Basson learned to her horror that the Lenbachhaus, the museum to which Münter donated her trove of preserved Blue Rider works, was about to be closed for three years. Unwilling to miss seeing the artist’s hand at work in the museum installation, within hours, Basson had bought a plane ticket to Munich. In room after room at the Lenbachhaus, Basson encountered the splendors of the Blue Riders whose emotional depth and intellectual energy drew her to Münter in the first place. And luckily for her, at that very moment, a major retrospective of Kandinsky was being held just across the street, a retrospective that would later go on to show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Guggenheim in New York City. From Munich, Basson traveled to Murnau to see Münter’s “yellow house” in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. That house has been restored and opened to the public as a reminder of the courage of the artist and a representation of a brilliant moment in German art history. For 39 years Peetie Basson taught Upper School English and served as an administrator at the University School of Milwaukee. She and her husband, Steve Basson, raised three sons on Milwaukee’s East Side. They now split their time between their Milwaukee home and their newly acquired pied-a-terre in Brooklyn, New York.