2
Shulamith Behr
IN my study ‘Künstlergruppe Brücke and the Public Sphere: Bridging the Gender Divide’, it was argued that, while the Brücke group was comprised exclusively of male practitioners, women participated in its promotion as spectators, patrons and supporters of contemporary art.1 Urbanization and modernity, the concomitant rise of the middle classes and the struggle for emancipation, albeit far short of political equality, were guarantors of women’s engagement in the public sphere. As participants in debates that called for cultural reform, women constituted a strong social entity in developing direct relationships with artists. This phenomenon was particularly apparent in regional cities, such as Dresden, Hamburg and Jena, where efforts were made to forge modern identity by mobilizing local institutions, traditions and culture. Women’s initiatives were no less important to the promotion of Der Blaue Reiter, as in the case of Der Gereonsklub in Cologne (1911–1913), which served as the second venue of the travelling exhibition in June 1912.2
Spurred on by secessionist ideas regarding the advancement of contemporary German and French art, the private club was founded by the artists Olga Oppenheimer (1886–1941) and Franz Matthias Jansen (1885–1958); indeed, its activities and exhibitions took place in Oppenheimer’s studio in the Gereonshaus, a recently completed office block that was commissioned by her father Max. The exhibition secretary was Emmy Worringer (1978–1961), sister of the well-known art historian Wilhelm. In 1907, she pursued artistic training with Oppenheimer in Munich and Dachau, and maintained contact with literary and artistic circles following the dissolution of the Gereonsklub. Without resurrecting debates about the nature of the avant-garde and modernism of the 1970s and 1980s, here avant-gardism can be interpreted as a broad field that embraced male practitioner, woman patron or supporter in a self-conscious definition of what constituted modern theory and practice.
But does this fluid sociological model suffice to explore the international community of artists, dancers, composers and art historians who were drawn into the circles of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM, Munich New Artists’ Association) and Der Blaue Reiter? Inevitably, the admission of women to the rank of exhibitors upsets the patriarchal hegemony of avant-garde creativity and introduces new relationships of power between people in the group.3 Such practices allow for critical use of methodologies that question the enshrined separateness of the artistic process and focus on issues of collaboration around gendered relationships and difference.4 Built around the intimate creative partnerships of Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, on the one hand, and Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin on the other – or their combined force as a meta-group within the NKVM – scholarship has examined whether such interchanges can escape the limitations imposed by social and psychological constructions of gender that identify separateness with masculinity, and connectedness and domesticity with femininity.5
Yet, by late 1911, the public profile of the exhibiting group Der Blaue Reiter had eclipsed that of the NKVM. Here, as Karen Lang reminds us, modernism brings in its wake the idea of the avant-garde and its narrative of ‘failed inheritance’, which purportedly drives the struggle against tradition and convention in art.6 Instructively, if we think laterally to events in the Berlin art world, in a speech celebrating the Berlin Secession’s tenth anniversary, Max Liebermann stressed that, even if secessions should disappear, they would rise again in different form and under different names: ‘Those who count as modern today may tomorrow be thrown on the scrap heap by their still modern successors. We are all children of our times’.7 Liebermann’s declaration was prescient since, two years hence, the Berlin Secession was riven by internal dissension, which led to the formation of the Neue Secession.8
As a group in early German modernism, Der Blaue Reiter shares in the ideas outlined above and in the avant-garde’s narrative of ‘failed inheritance’. Moreover, the ethos and aesthetic of ‘children of our times’ and ‘oedipal killing off of the parent’ has particular resonance in the events leading up to the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter; it is broadly acknowledged that Kandinsky’s spiritual abstraction and technical radicalism was responsible for his, Münter’s, Franz Marc’s and Alfred Kubin’s secession from the NKVM on 2 December 1911. However, the desire to cleanse the slate and start afresh altered the sociology and gender balance of the group. The nucleus of the foursome had expanded to include the young Munich artist Marc and his future wife, the artist Maria Franck, as well as the Bonn-based couple August and Elisabeth Macke, among others. Indeed, the dynamics of Münter’s and Kandinsky’s collaboration was changed by the linkage of his name with that of Marc, as co-editor of the almanac and organizer of the exhibitions. Within a short period Kandinsky’s correspondence with Marc reached an intensity that was comparable to the exchange of letters with Münter.9 Although much of this was dedicated to planning, there was meaningful communication regarding their current artistic theory and practice. As in the case of the pre-war relationship between Picasso and Braque, while maintaining the integrity of their distinctive statements, Marc and Kandinsky forged a path based on mutual recognition of each other’s talent. Whether Münter was merely a spectator to this new evolving male artistic partnership or shared in what has been termed a ‘doubling of masculine creativity’ are considerations that will be held in abeyance.10
For, at this juncture, it is pertinent to question the model of male-bonding containment and, via a discussion that includes Werefkin, examine whether Der Blaue Reiter harboured the staging of more complex notions of gendered authorship and agency. Certainly, in 1913, the concept of a ‘blauen Reiterreiterin’ was entertained in the correspondence between the poet, artist and writer Else Lasker-Schüler and Werefkin. As we will see, through consideration of the laws of association and networking in literary and artistic communities, the plural meanings of Werefkin’s name challenge logocentric interpretations of Der Blaue Reiter.11 Hence, this study aims to go beyond stereotypical categories of binary thinking about the nature of masculinity and femininity in exposing women artists’ positioning in this avant-garde group.
Gender and place
The Munich milieu was critical to the ambience in which incipient emancipation, progressive modernism and the transnational (or foreign) fulminated against the local and the traditional. Since the mid-nineteenth century the Bavarian capital vied with Berlin for pre-eminence. Artists were attracted to the Munich art world, which offered the coexistence of monumental history painting, associated with the Academy, naturalistic modes, rooted in the Artists’ Union and bourgeois art market, alongside secessionist and Jugendstil stirrings in the 1890s.12 For aspiring women artists the formation of the women’s academy of the Münchner Künstlerinnenverein (Munich Women Artists’ Association) in 1882 was critical to the initial instruction of Käthe Schmidt (Kollwitz) and Münter, to name a few.13 The encounter with feminist circles was inevitable in this environment, so much so that it was observed that the modern literary and artistic movement was so closely interlinked with the women’s movement that those trends of ‘the Moderns’ were, as a norm, regarded and confounded with those of ‘the woman’, to quote well-known writer and art historian Georg Jacob Wolf.14
As the artists’ and intellectuals’ quarter in the northern part of Munich, the Schwabing area had its own Bohemia. Within the censorious milieu of a Roman Catholic majority, the Dionysian rituals pursued within the circle of the writers Karl Wolfskehl and Stefan George achieved notoriety. Apparently, the promiscuous lifestyle of the token woman in this group, the writer and artist Franziska zu Reventlov (1871–1918), went unmolested by the police only by virtue of her aristocratic descent.15 Arriving in Munich from St. Petersburg in 1896, Marianne Werefkin (1860–1938) became known as the ‘Baronin’, which drew on the advantages of her mother’s aristocratic lineage and father’s military background.16 She was trained by Ilya Repin in the Wanderers’ realist tradition, as well as in the Moscow Academy, and her works from the 1890s portrayed figural types – Jews, peasants, servants – drawn from the margins of society that she encountered at the Werefkin summer estate in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania. In Munich, her Giselastraße residence in Schwabing became the hub of the so-called ‘Russian colony’.17 Devoting her first decade in Munich to discourse rather than painting, Werefkin’s aura as a ‘prophetic voice’ was established early on in her formation of the Brotherhood of St. Luke in 1897. These informal salons, which were held at her apartment, were centred on the emotional art of the future in considering the works of van Gogh and Gauguin. In 1909, her pivotal role as a founder member of the NKVM signalled her centrality to the utopian and synthesizing aims of the association.
Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) paid deference to her in the Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, 1909 (figure 2.1), painted in Murnau, negotiating the spectacle of an urbane woman’s sojourn in the Bavarian town. In an undated note, Münter recalled: ‘I painted the Werefkina in 1909 before the yellow base of my house. It was a bombastic appearance, self-confidently, authoritatively, richly dressed, with a hat like a carriage wheel, on which all kinds of things had place’.18 Typical of a disciple, Münter’s reminiscence was not without ambivalence, Werefkin’s purported aristocratic origins and temperamental strength of character being well documented.19 Nevertheless, her painting valorizes the older woman, the casually elegant draping of the long scarf and tipped hat reinforcing a youthful demeanour. Demonstrating her technical command and fluency with codes of expressive emphasis that are as audacious as Fauvist painting, Münter arranges the three-quarter-length figure against a freely painted yellow ground (the wall of her house). The triangular composition and directional brushstrokes guide our attention to the head, which is turned towards the spectator but glances sideways. Discordant colour combinations, the largely olive tones of the face reflecting the plum-like colours of the scarf, reinforce this focus. Thickened dark lines furthermore circumscribe colour areas, making them function as vibrant shapes.
In reviewing the first travelling exhibition of the NKVM, the art critic of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung appeared to lack the experience and vocabulary to assess the abstraction in Münter’s portraiture:
Gabriele Münter literally imitates the drawings of small children, of which the most modern education has made too much fuss – this uninhibited manner that flies in the face of any sense for perspective and natural forms and [this manner] that pretends hideous features to be human faces, green spots to be eyes, square blocks to be noses, broad slits to be mouths, must be rejected. The broad mass of spectators must be protected from such a sight; will they not otherwise also become mad? – The principle ‘sensation at any price’ does not belong in an art exhibition.20
Whereas the critic is perceptive in detecting the importance of child art to Münter, one is curious as to why he felt that these works were so troubling – her submission included two portraits of women – and why spectators required protection.21
Although we are aware that Münter’s Paris sojourn had acquainted her with Synthetist aesthetic theory, particularly in relation to her coloured linocut portraits, she wrote in her diary of the epochal Murnau visit of 1908, where she, Kandinsky, Werefkin and Jawlensky forged their relationship and pursued shared interests. This initiated a period of interaction that involved them testing the limits of painting within the landscape genre, as well as activating their interest in folk art. Münter testified to her departure from an Impressionist mode of depicting nature, ‘to feeling the content of things – abstracting – conveying an extract’.22 She referred chiefly to Jawlensky, who ‘passed on what he had experienced and learned – talked about “synthesis”’. Of the four artists, Jawlensky had the most consistent experience of the French avant-garde and he adopted the term ‘synthesis’ to apply to the technique of Cloisonnism, the radical simplification of form and colour, bound by line, so as to avoid anecdotal content.23 Indeed the term became a rhetorical catchword in Kandinsky’s formulation of the programme for the catalogue of the first exhibition of the NKVM in 1909, wherein he proclaimed their search ‘for artistic forms … that must be freed from everything incidental, in order to bring only what is necessary to express strongly – in short, the pursuit of artistic synthesis’.24
2.1 Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Marianne Werefkin (Bildnis Marianne Werefkin), 1909.
In her portrayal of women from her social and artistic environment, Münter certainly went beyond the incidental embodiment of the subject. As we have seen in her Portrait of Werefkin, this was not a prescriptive idealization of form, since Münter relied on a daring use of the phenomenological and sensate experience of space. Given that traditional artistic vocabulary was inadequate to signify women’s entry into modernity, Münter’s portraits suggest a ‘new synthesis’ whereby the abstracting processes – low viewing point, proximity, facture – direct the spectator to an unexpected assertion of womanhood. The anonymous reviewer cited above was evidently threatened by this ‘show of force’, these portraits functioning as an ‘emblematic sign of the failure of power’s symbolic currency’.25 Since ‘woman as a sign’ is critical to this theorization of ‘synthesis’, it differentiates Münter’s practice from her male colleagues’ usage of the term and alludes to the more vexing construction of the ‘woman as artist’.26 Certainly, at this juncture, we can observe that Münter’s avant-garde strategies match those outlined by Griselda Pollock, albeit in another context, which include a reference to contemporary practice, deference to the latest developments and difference from current aesthetics and criticism in the bid for ‘modern’ art.27 As will be shown, such conclusions can also be drawn from Werefkin’s theories and concurrent practice.
While the constitutive constraints on modern artistic identity in Germany were applicable to both genders, societal constructions of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘artist’ were mutually exclusive. These dualities plagued Werefkin, who found it necessary to invent a third self, as she noted in her journal Lettres á un Inconnu (Letters to an Unknown, 1901–1905) in 1905:
I am not cowardly and I keep my word. I am faithful to myself, ferocious to myself and indulgent to others. That is I, the man. I love the song of love – that is I, the woman. I consciously create for myself illusions and dreams, that is I the artist … I am much more a man than a woman. The desire to please and to pity alone makes me a woman. I hear and I take note … I am neither man nor woman – I am I.28
Werefkin’s well-known Self Portrait, 1910 (figure 2.2), appears to draw on the sustenance of this inner rapport in presenting the woman artist as a visionary force. Here, Werefkin has no need to wear her womanliness as a mask in order to hide the possession of masculinity.29 The appropriation of masculine Nietzschean energy, in order to forge her creativity (‘I am neither man nor woman – I am I [the artist]’, was the vehicle through which she was able to explore the autonomy of artistic formation.30 Evidently, although the portrayal of the self-image would appear to be one of the most solitary acts of the creative process, the artist as model, the portrait evinces the most complex interaction between private and public life.31 In this instance, it is instructive that Werefkin exhibited the work as one of eight paintings contributed to the third exhibition of the NKVM, which opened at the Galerie Thannhauser on 18 December 1911, concurrent with the initiating exhibition of the Editors of Der Blaue Reiter.32
While this painting serves to illuminate the limits of Werefkin’s homage to painterly abstraction, the critical language used in developing a theory of art making differs substantially from Kandinsky’s writings.33 No longer do we encounter the rhetoric of phallic mastery and penetration but a rapport that speaks of ‘illusions’ and ‘dreams’, almost as though the creative process involves a fantasy of sexual foreplay before the divided self attains its unique identity in the work of art. Although it responds to precedents of van Gogh and, indeed, Jawlensky in its three-quarter-view pose, summarily cut-off composition and swirling brushstrokes, its crafting is more layered, stylistically speaking. When Werefkin resumed painting in 1906, she revised her understanding of what constituted high art and abandoned the earthy tonalities of oil painting on canvas. Preferring to use the saturation of colours and the quicker drying processes of a mixed technique, she achieves translucency as well as impasto-like effects within the limited flexibility of the gouache and tempera mediums. This is focused in particular on the area of most concentrated attention, around the startling red eyes and knitted brow.
As one of a series of works presumed to have arisen out of her return visit to Kovno, where her brother Peter was governor of the Province or gubernia, the Self Portrait signals Werefkin’s assertive – albeit conflicted – engagement with her Russian origins. The discovery of Werefkin’s correspondence with Jawlensky, including letters from her period of absence between December 1909 and the spring of 1910, reveals much about her yearning for a privileged youth in the outposts of Imperial Russia.34 Typical of émigré experience on returning to their roots,35 Werefkin commented that she ached ‘for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life’ – that which was absent from a city in which the dialect was mainly Polish or broken Russian.36 Indeed, only escape into a church – ‘Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons’ – provided succour. In Kovno, she stated, ‘something terrible, terrible lies over everything’ and yet was a ‘treasure-trove for artists’.
As has been effectively argued, paintings, such as Return Home, c. 1909 (figure 2.3), match the evocative language and fiery scenarios configured in Werefkin’s illustrated correspondence.37 Whereas her earlier focus on the social topic of labour had much in common with the paintings of the school of Pont Aven and expressive distortions of Edvard Munch, here she invests the motifs common to her Murnau interlude with transnational and -cultural resonance. Indeed, there is merit to the claim that she was strongly aware of the importance of local ethnicities to modern Lithuanian painting.38 Werefkin imbues the receding provincial cityscape with an eerie beauty of reflected coloured light and the procession of faceless and burdened washerwomen reveals a less than idealized commentary on peasant life in the changing economy and identity politics of the Pale.
2.2 Marianne Werefkin, Self Portrait (Selbstbildnis), c. 1910.
2.3 Marianne Werefkin, Return Home (Heimkehr), c. 1909.
In November 1912, on the publication of Otto Fischer’s controversial book Das Neue Bild, Werefkin, Jawlensky, Wladimir von Bechtejeff, Moissey Kogan and Alexander Mogilewski seceded from the NKVM.39 Interestingly, then, neither Werefkin’s nor Jawlensky’s works were included in the initial Blaue Reiter exhibitions. Indeed, they weren’t listed as participating in its Berlin venue in March 1912, which launched the opening of Herwarth Walden’s Sturm Gallery, an event that had tremendous significance for the marketing of Der Blaue Reiter. But by October 1912 they were included in a large exhibition that opened at the premises of the Neue Kunstsalon Hans Goltz at Odeonsplatz and, by 1913, along with other artists of Der Blaue Reiter, their works were featured in Walden’s Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, a blockbuster exhibition of international importance. Hence, given Werefkin’s complex relationships to the NKVM and Der Blaue Reiter, it is understandable that the uncovering of interactions and communications, the networks linking space and time, is achieved through less tangible evidence – through her correspondence and theoretical aims – than the mere listing of her name in exhibition catalogues.
Else Lasker-Schuler, Prince of Thebes
As indicated earlier, in 1913, the notion ‘des blauen Reiterreiterin’ (the blue rider’s woman rider) was broached in the correspondence between the poet, writer and artist Else Lasker-Schüler and Werefkin (see figure 2.4). Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was already in an epistolary exchange with Marc, which held consequences for both their developments.40 Here, however, Lasker-Schüler deployed the term as a metaphor, suggesting the integration of the rider and horsewoman, Werefkin being addressed as both ‘vieladeliger, wilder Junge’ (noble, wild lad) and ‘süsse Malerin’ (sweet woman painter). This conjunction and disjunction of values and gender-crossing is as typical of the poet’s style of addressing her female colleagues as it is of her own fictional self-naming. She signs herself ‘Prince Jussuf/the Prince of Thebes’ and this is accompanied by her self-portrait, adorned with cosmic symbols and exotic, plumed hat, which can be identified as a Kriegshut (War Hat). This can be viewed in a concurrent reproduction, based on a drawing in Marc’s possession at the time and published in the literary magazine Saturn 3:4, April, 1913.41
2.4 Letter by Else Lasker-Schüler to Marianne Werefkin (Blaue Reiterreiterin), 1913.
Though her second marriage to Herwarth Walden disintegrated in 1911, Lasker-Schüler, albeit impoverished, was by that time in the forefront of literary productivity and was invited to give poetry readings in Berlin and other major European cities, performances which were highly charged with the intensity of both her personality and her material. One can judge from posed photographs, dependent on notions of gesture and masquerade, Lasker-Schüler herself dressed in baggy Eastern trouser suits and gaudy cheap jewellery for these occasions, modelling her adopted persona on a Pharaonic funerary relief source (figure 2.5).42 Interpretations abound of Lasker-Schüler’s appropriation of the Joseph myth elicited in part from her own reminiscences regarding her German-Jewish childhood and of her dressing up in colourful clothes to act out the story. Apparently, her mother encouraged these fantasies, since the ability to interpret dreams was something very rare and special.43 On a more critical level, her identification with the outsider prince testifies to her marginality, as a German-Jew and woman poet seeking prophetic status in male-dominated literary circles. Hence, as in the case of Werefkin, the integrated figure of the ‘wo/man’ is seen as a subversive agent, through which Lasker-Schüler could experiment with poetic licence.44
In 1913, Lasker-Schüler dedicated a poem to Werefkin which stressed the artist’s Russian origins and childhood emergence into a ‘Meisterin’. In three of the five stanzas cited below, one can speculate that she was referring to Werefkin’s works comparable to the painting Return Home, portraying the silhouettes of peasant women in the sunset-lit darkness of the cityscape:
Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne plays with the colours of Russia’s painting:
Green, light green, pink, white,
And not forgetting cobalt blue,
These are her faithful playfellows.
Marianne von Werefkin –
I called her the noble street lad,
Rascal of Russian town, a hand
In every prank for miles around.
…
Marianne’s soul and her unbounded heart
Like to play at joy and pain,
Just as she takes to painting melancholy
In colours that twitter like birds.45
2.5 Photograph of Else Lasker-Schüler as Fakir from Thebes. Frontispiece from her novel Mein Herz, 1912.
Lasker-Schüler seizes on the constructs of child-like ‘play’ with the formal elements as appropriate to the creative process as well as to the ‘Süßigkeit’ (sweetness) of the colouration. Yet these childhood games are invested with transgression – the rascal sows havoc in the Russian town. The severity of Werefkin’s style, steep perspectives and elongated figures evoke alienating experiences of her return home, as conveyed in her correspondence with Jawlensky. Painted in gouache and tempera, conceived over a period of time and undated, these mysterious works elicit the sensations of the Expressionist repertoire, the familiar made strange, the toying with both joyous and painful memories.46
In 1914, in a little known ‘Talk on the symbol, the sign and its significance in mystical art’, a treatise that accompanied an exhibition of her works in The School of Art in Vilnius, Werefkin could speak with collegiality of the multivalent positions – between abstraction and figuration – in Der Blaue Reiter:
Many of my friends … talk directly the language of primary symbols, for example, Kandinsky in painting or Schœnberg in music and they are right, perhaps even more than I am. But my closest friends and I … believe only in the example of it [life]. That is why we do not renounce it, we do not escape from it, but we love it, it and its forms; we compel it to serve our faith …
I would have liked to show you and tell you about the work of my friends in order to explain more accurately, in the light of their examples, what we believe in. But you do not know their works. I must be content to talk about my works which you have kindly had brought to you. I would ask you for this reason not to consider this speech … as the desire of promoting myself. My friends and I we form a unity.47
Werefkin’s conception of her position in the group interpolates in the well-worn narratives of Der Blaue Reiter and allows some insight as to how her persona as a Reiter/Reiterin, who could channel the irrational wildness of the id through creative play, attracted a cohort of talented women, such as the poet Lasker-Schüler. In the Derridean sense, the power of the aristocratic name ‘von Werefkin’ or ‘Baronin’, which circulated in the German art world’s print communities, marked her entry into language – defying the singularity offered by the logos.48 That Der Blaue Reiter could accommodate for this form of metonymic and performative interplay between the masculine and feminine signals that its major legacies to the field of pre-emancipation sexual and cultural politics has yet to be written.
Notes
1S. Behr, ‘Künstlergruppe Brücke and the Public Sphere: Bridging the Gender Divide’, in Christian Weikop (ed.), Bridging History: Perspectives on Brücke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 99–124.
2See Hildegard Reinhardt, ‘Die Geschichte des Kölner Gereonsklubs (1911–1913)’, in Der Gereonsklub 1911–1913. Europas Avantgarde im Rheinland (Bonn: August Macke Haus, 1993), pp. 9–24.
3This ethos stemmed from the openness of Russian precedents, where there were more opportunities for women practitioners on both professional and social fronts, and where women were allowed access to academic training thirty years earlier than in Germany. Indeed, Kandinsky forcefully chided the Berlin organizers of the Neue Secession exhibitions for setting up barriers against women’s art, which he stated in his experience ‘poisons’ the best of intentions. See A. Hoberg, ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München und Blaue Reiter’, in A. Hoberg and H. Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild 1909–1912 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München, 1999), p. 17, note 20, citing Kandinsky’s letter to George Tappert, 14 December 1912, Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung.
4Such questions are posed in W. Chadwick and I. de Courtivron (eds), Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
5Ibid., p. 7. In their introduction, the editors refer to these concepts raised by the feminist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow in her book, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); See S. Behr, ‘Kandinsky, Münter and Creative Partnership’, in Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird (eds), Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1900–1921 (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 77–100; 213–14; B. K. Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky & Münter, Arp & Tauber (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014); R. Benjamin with C. Ashjian, ‘Kandinsky and Münter in Tunisia’, in Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 17–94.
6K. Lang, ‘Response: The Far in the Near’, The Art Bulletin, 81:1 (March 2007), pp. 26–34. Such an intervention was initially made by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who deployed the Freudian oedipal trope of ‘killing off’ predecessors to characterize avant-garde male artists’ rejection of father figures. See G. Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 20, note 16, p. 74.
7M. Liebermann, ‘Zehn Jahre Sezession’ [1908], in Günter Busch (ed.), Die Phantasie in der Malerei: Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1978), p. 179, cited by P. Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, London: Belknap Press, 1980), p. 167.
8For amplification on the Neue Secession, founded in April 1910, see A. Daemgen, ‘Die Neue Secession in Berlin’, in exh. cat., Liebermanns Gegner: Die Neue Secession in Berlin und der Expressionismus (Berlin: Max Liebermann Haus, 2011), pp. 13–83.
9See W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983).
10Further discussion of this terminology can be found in J. Beckett, ‘Book Review’, Women’s Art Magazine, 54:29–30 (September/October, 1993).
11Here, I rely on the post-structural methodology of Jacques Derrida in ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’, in Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1978), pp. 27–73.
12R. Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 108–11.
13Extensive material on the Munich Künstlerinnenverein can be found in Y. Deseyve, Der Künstlerinnen-Verein München e.V. und seine Damen-Akademie. Eine Studie zur Ausbildungssituation von Künstlerinnen im späten 19, und frühen 20 Jahrhundert (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2005).
14G. J. Wolf, Die Münchnerin: Kultur- und Sittenbilder aus dem alten und neuen München (Munich: Franz Hanfstaengl, 1924), p. 218: ‘Es [die moderne Literatur- und Kunstbewegung] wurden daher häufig die beiden Strömungen, die der Frauenbewegung und die der “Moderne”, als eines Wesens angesehen und verwechselt’.
15See C. Diethe, Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), p. 194.
16See G. Pauli, Erinnerungen aus sieben Jahrzehnten (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1936), pp. 264ff. For biography, bibliography and discussion of key works see S. Behr, ‘Marianne Werefkin’, in D. Gaze (ed.), Dictionary of Women Artists, vol. 2 (London, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborne, 1997), pp. 1441–5.
17A. Kochman, ‘Russian Émigré Artists and Political Opposition in Fin-De-Siècle Munich’, Emporia State Research Studies, 45:1 (2009), pp. 6–26.
18A. Hoberg and H. Friedel, Gabriele Münter 1877–1962. Retrospektive (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1992), p. 264, cat. no. 63: ‘Die Werefkina malte ich 1909 vor dem gelben Sockel meines Hauses. Sie war eine pompöse Erscheinung, selbstbewußt, herrisch, reich gekleidet, mit einem Hut wie ein Wagenrad, auf dem allerhand Dinge Platz hatten’.
19See E. Erdmann-Macke, Erinnerung an August Macke (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1982), pp. 238–40.
20Anon., Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 8 May 1910: ‘Gabriele Münter imitiert buchstäblich die Zeichnungen kleiner Kinder, von denen die modernste Pädagogik zu viel Wesens gemacht hat – diese Ungeniertheit, die jedem Sinn für Perspektive und natürliche Formen hohnspricht und ekelhafte Fratzen als menschliches Gesichter, die grüne Flecken für Augen, eckige Klötze für Nasen, breite Schlitze für Münder ausgibt, muß abgelehnt werden. Vor solchem Anblick muß die breite Masse der Besucher bewahrt werden; muß auch sie nicht irre werden? – Der Grundsatz ‘Sensation um jeden Preis’ gehört nicht in eine Kunstausstellung’.
21See Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, pls. 34 and 35 (Dame mit Hut, 1909–1910, oil on board, 76 × 52 cm, Private Collection; Bildnis einer jungen Dame – Junge Polin, 1909, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 52.4 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum Gift of Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley). Barbara Wörwag examines the significance of child art to Münter and Kandinsky in her essay ‘“There is an Unconscious, Vast Power in the Child”: Notes on Kandinsky, Münter and Children’s Drawings’, in Jonathan Fineberg (ed.), Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 68–94.
22Münter, Diary, 1911, in A. Hoberg (ed.), Wassily Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter in Murnau und Kochel 1902–1914, Briefe und Erinnerungen (Munich: Prestel, 1994), pp. 45–6.
23A. Hoberg, ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München und Blaue Reiter’, in Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, pp. 13–14. Jawlensky spent short periods in Normandy and Paris in 1903 and 1905 and absorbed the impact in his painting of van Gogh, Gauguin and the Nabis. In 1907, the painter monk Willibrod Verkade worked in Jawlensky’s studio in Munich, thus endorsing the lessons of Gauguin and Paul Sérusier.
24W. Kandinsky, ‘Vorwort’, Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich: Moderne Galerie, 1909): ‘das suchen nach künstlerischen Formen … die von allem Nebensächlichen befreit sein müssen, um nur das Notwendige stark zum Ausdruck zu bringen – kurz das Streben nach künstlerischer Synthese’.
25A. Kroker and D. Cook, ‘Parson’s Foucault’, in The Post-Modern Scene, Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 228, as cited in L. Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 8.
26For the feminist coordinates of ‘differencing synthesis’ see S. Behr, ‘Beyond the Muse: Gabriele Münter as Expressionistin’, in Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906–1917 (London: Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 2005), pp. 58–68.
27Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893, pp. 12–15. I thank the anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to endorse this observation.
28‘Je ne suis pas lâche et je tiens la parole donnée. Je suis fidèle à moi-même, féroce à moi même et indulgente aux autres. Voilà moi homme. J’aime le chant de l’amour – voilà moi femme. Je me crée consciemment des illusions et des rêves – voilà moi artiste … Je suis un homme bien plus qu’une femme. Le besoin de plaire et le pitié seuls me font femme. J’écoute et je prends notes. Tous les jugements tombent à côté. Il est beaucoup trop jeune pour comprendre ce qu’il pouvait avoir en moi. Je ne suis ni homme, ni femme: je suis moi’. Fondazione Marianne Werefkin (Archive), Museo Comunale d’Arte di Ascona: M. Werefkin, Lettres á un Inconnu, vol. 3 (30 October 1905), p. 257.
29See J. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ [1929], in V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan, Formations of Fantasy (London, New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 38.
30This was discussed by Mara Witzling in an unpublished paper ‘My beautiful, my unique, myself, my muse: Werefkin’s “Inconnu” and women artists’ appropriation of artistic authority’, College Art Association, 1993.
31For a discussion of women artists’ negotiation of self-portraiture see S. Behr, ‘Die Arbeit am eigenen Bild. Das Selbstporträt bei Gabriele Münter’, in A. Hoberg and H. Friedel, Gabriele Münter 1877–1962. Retrospektive (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1992), pp. 85–91.
32Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, p. 50.
33Further examination of the dynamic between Kandinsky and Werefkin can be found in S. Behr, ‘Veiling Venus: Gender and Painterly Abstraction in Early German Modernism’, in C. Arscott and K. Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 126–41.
34L. Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, ‘Marianna Verefkina. Zhizn’ v iskusstve’, Vilnius, 2 (1992), pp. 92–104; 3 (1992), pp. 126–37; ‘Reisen nach Litauen’, in N. Brögmann (ed.), Marianne von Werefkin.: Oeuvres peintes 1907–1936 (Gingin: Fondation Neumann, 1996), pp. 93–101; ‘Der unbekannte Briefnachlaß der Malerin Marianne Werefkin’, in B. Weidle (ed.), Marianne Werefkin. Die Farbe beisst mich ans Herz (Bonn: August Macke Haus, 1999), pp. 58–71.
35E. Said observes this phenomenon in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2001), p. 175.
36See A. Kochmann, ‘Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin’s Return Home, c. 1909’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (spring 2006), p. 4, for translation of letter to Alexej Jawlensky, 1910, RS Fond 19–1458, pp. 17–18, 27–8, Lithuanian Martynas-Mazvydas National Library, Vilnius.
37Ibid., pp. 1–21.
38A. Merges-Knoth, ‘“Ich sehe in allem hier mich selbst”: Marianne Werefkin und Litauen’, in Weidle (ed.), Marianne Werefkin, pp. 76–88.
39For coverage of the impact of O. Fischer’s Das Neue Bild (Munich: Delphin, 1912), see H. Wille, ‘“Das Neue Bild” von Otto Fischer’, in Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, pp. 321–8.
40F. Marc and E. Lasker-Schüler, ‘Der Blaue Reiter präsentiert Eurer Hoheit sein Blaues Pferd’: Karten und Briefe, ed. P-K. Schuster (Munich: Prestel, 1987).
41Selbstbildniß des Prinzen von Theben im Kriegshut in ‘Werkverzeichnis’, in R. Dick (ed.), Elsa Lasker-Schüler. Die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2010), no. i23, p. 264.
42The origins and development of the Joseph theme are discussed in R. Dick, ‘Elsa Lasker-Schüler als Künstlerin’, in Dick (ed.), Elsa Lasker-Schüler, pp. 123–9.
43Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Das Hebräerland (Zurich: Oprecht, 1937), in Elsa Lasker-Schüler. Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 4:1, pp. 57ff. For the exilic context of Lasker-Schüler’s reminiscences see A. Schmetterling, ‘“Das ist direkt ein Diebstahl an den Kunsthistorikern”. Elsa Lasker-Schülers bildnerisches Werk im kunsthistorischen Kontext’, in R. Dick (ed.), Elsa Lasker-Schüler, pp. 161–93.
44For further amplification see S. Behr, ‘Performing the Wo/man: The ‘Interplay’ between Marianne Werefkin and Else Lasker-Schüler’, in Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche (eds), Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle (Leiden, Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016), pp. 92–105.
45K. J. Skrodzki (ed.), Else Lasker-Schüler, Sämtliche Gedichte, trans. N. Shearman (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 344ff:
Marianne spielt mit den Farben Rußlands Malen:
Grün, Hellgrün, Rosa, Weiß,
Und namentlich der Kobaltblau
Sind ihre treuen Spielgefährtin.
Marianne von Werefkin –
Ich nannte sie den adeligen Straßenjungen
Schelm der Russenstadt, im weiten Umkreis
Jeden Streich gepachtet …
Mariannens Seele und ihr unbändig Herz
Spielen gern zusammen Freud und Leid,
Wie sie so oft die Melancholie
Hinmalt mit zwitschernden Farbentönen.
46The Freudian unheimlich is raised in Kochman, ‘Ambiguity of Home’, pp. 7–8.
47Marianne Werefkin, Vilenskij vestnik (1914) no. 3234, as trans. ‘Causerie sur le symbole, le signe et sa signification dans l’art mystique’, in Marianne Werefkin Lettres a un inconnu: Aux sources de l’expressionisme, ed. Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), pp. 175–82, English trans. I. Boldry.
48See, in particular, the essay ‘Khōra’, in J. Derrida, On the Name, ed. T. Dutoit, trans. I. McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89–127, in which the proper noun and its associations are discussed. Here khōraic metonymy supersedes the singularity offered by the logos.