By James Brewer
Visionary women artists who charted a radical course in Germany in the early 20th century are given full honours by this stirring London exhibition. Theirs are ground-breaking works in a critical chapter of art history. What they achieved is already lodged in the chromosomes of culturally aware Germans, and now a century after their peak brilliance these artists are to enjoy a deservedly wider audience.
Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin is the first major UK exhibition devoted to women who rejected traditional forms of art as they turned painting and drawing away from the male gaze and male dominance.
The Royal Academy show, which runs until February 12, 2023, highlights 67 paintings and works on paper primarily by the four artists in the headline title, with additional pieces by Erma Bossi, Ottilie Reylaender and Jacoba van Heemskerck. Their quantum leap in imagery and technique paralleled the explosion of experimentation and female talent taking by storm Paris and other European centres – although leaving unadventurous Britain behind. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, they were part of burgeoning movements for female political rights that blew away the cobwebs in every country.
The four featured women are celebrated in Germany to this day, while still unknown to most British art lovers except those in the city of Leicester where the civic gallery was fortunate to have an enlightened curator who in the 1940s promoted Expressionist works – as explained later in this article.
With the heavy hand of the Prussian Empire repressing stirrings for women’s rights and wider cultural freedom, artists looked for inspiration to Paris, to its avant-garde artistic community, and to its displays of great art. They returned to their easels, palettes, and sketchpads to create compositions of impressive individuality.
The stories of every woman in this exhibition are moving, especially that of the best-known, Käthe Kollwitz, who knew from personal experience familial and societal anguish and could depict it forcefully even with rudimentary materials. With female selfhood at the heart of her approach, she like Modersohn-Becker, Münter and Werefkin, helped write the vocabulary of Expressionist art.
Whenever they are shown, Käthe Kollwitz’s lithographs and drawings cry out for attention. Among them here with their raw emotional impact are a 1925 crayon drawing of A Mother pressing her baby to herself; an etching Woman with Dead Child, from 1903 in which the two figures melt in each other; and the equally devastating etching Death and Woman (1910), in which a skeleton violently tries to haul away a distraught woman as a child clings to her desperately.
“As an artist,” Kollwitz wrote, “I have the right to extract the emotional content out of everything, to let things work upon me and then give them outward form.”
Kollwitz who was born in 1867 in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) started with the advantage, rare for her time, of a father’s encouragement to become a full-time artist. He took her to local teachers before enrolling her in art schools in Berlin and Munich. At the age of 22, she painted a group of self-portraits in which she adopted different attitudes: one of the works is on show and earns the comment from the curators: “Her confident pose recalls Rembrandt.”
Käthe had no intention of becoming another Rembrandt, though. She turned to graphic arts, influenced by her fellow artist Max Klinger (1857–1920) who championed drawing over painting. That way, Kollwitz could agitate directly against social injustice. She wrote in her diary: “I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain high.” This she did until the end of her days, in 1945.
In the clinic of her doctor husband in Berlin, she saw at first hand the effects of privation and death. The experience of nearly losing her elder son Hans to diphtheria in 1908, and the death of her son Peter in 1914 during World War I meant death, sacrifice and mourning became lifelong themes. Her raw depiction of women and their hardships, including frequent self-portraits, resonates as strongly as ever in the 21st century as international and civil wars rage.
Kollwitz in 1919 became the first female professor at the Prussian Academy of Art but had to resign in 1933 as the Nazis assumed power. Sadly, many of her works were lost when her apartment was bombed. She lives on in the German psyche: the country has more than 40 schools named after her.
Many of the pieces in Making Modernism are shown in the UK for the first time, and Axel Rüger, secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy, said they would be a revelation to much of the British public who were familiar with their male counterparts. Mr Rüger, who was born in Dortmund and is a former director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said that the women artists were instrumental in moving forward the modernist movement in Germany and more widely the Expressionist movement in the 20th century.
One of the two curators, Dorothy Price, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute, spoke of the intimacy seen in powerful images of the female body and of anxious children. The children are not romanticised but painted in their vulnerable essence, she said.
The women were all successful artists during their lifetime, emphasised co-curator Sarah Lee of the Royal Academy, but they were under-represented in most British public collections, except for that of Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The East Midlands city’s acclaimed collection of early 20th century German art is thanks notably to its former curator Trevor Thomas who in 1944 staged an exhibition of Mid-European Art with works loaned by émigré families. At the core of that exhibition were 50 pictures from a collection of 4,000 that had been amassed by Alfred Hess, a wealthy Jewish shoe manufacturer who died unexpectedly in 1931. In 1933 Hess’s son Hans fled from the Nazis to France while his widow Tekla tried to smuggle out various works, and eventually joined Hans in England.
Most of the Hess collection disappeared during the Nazi years, but the surviving works were celebrated in the Leicester exhibition, which was sponsored by anti-Nazi Germans in Britain. Leicester’s Expressionist collection has been growing ever since.
One of the Leicester works is Portrait of Anna Roslund from 1917 painted in Copenhagen by Gabriele Münter, chosen because of its striking impact by the Royal Academy for reproduction in a promotional exhibition poster. Anna Roslund was a Swedish-born author and musician. In the painting, she looks out assertively, dressed in alluring blue, with cropped hairstyle and smoking her pipe as a symbol of her bohemianism. Anna’s sister, Nell Roslund, married the art dealer Herwarth Walden who in 1912 established Galerie der Sturm (the Storm Gallery) in Berlin which brought artists including Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and the Dutch painter Jacoba Van Heemskerck to international attention.
Münter used bold hues and simple forms throughout in interior studies, still-life, portraits, and landscapes. Born in Berlin in 1877, she travelled extensively from 1903-1907 with her lover and former teacher Wassily Kandinsky through Europe and North Africa, and absorbed the influences of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, the Fauves and Henri Matisse – in evidence after the couple returned to Germany in April 1908. The following year Münter bought a place she named the Yellow House, in homage to Van Gogh.
Münter and Kandinsky were at the forefront of the New Artists’ Association in Munich, and the Blue Rider, groups that articulated the new approach to painting. They were constantly drawn to the lakes and Alpine mountains near the Bavarian town of Murnau, where they worked in company with their friends Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin. Kandinsky returned to Russia on the outbreak of war in 1914 and married another woman – after the separation, Münter painted scenes of women with wistful gaze.
Around 1910, Erma Bossi, who got to know Werefkin and Münter in Munich, painted in oil on cardboard a distinctive Portrait of Marianne Werefkin. Despite the title, some scholars have suggested that this could be a self-portrait of Bossi, who came from Italian-speaking Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Marianne Werefkin was highlighted the solidarity of women in the face of their arduous daily routines. She was born near Moscow in 1860 into an aristocratic Russian family. In 1888, she accidentally shot herself in the hand during a hunt and had to re-train herself to paint; but the positive consequence was that while undergoing medical treatment in Germany her eyes were opened in the country’s museums to much Western European art.
Werefkin was a protégé of the Russian realist artist Ilya Repin, who compared her to Rembrandt, but in 1892 she fell in love with one of Repin’s students, Alexei Jawlensky, and the pair became the centre of a lively group of futuristic artists. Her exposure in France to proponents of Symbolism and Fauvism – Gauguin, Matisse, and Derain – was decisive. At the influential Galerie Der Sturm in 1914 her art was shown alongside that of van Heemskerck.
Werefkin insisted that being an artist “does not mean possessing a faculty of combining lines and paints… but having a world inside oneself and individual forms to express it.” Such individual forms would include figures trudging down a road, toting babies or bags of laundry. Twins, from 1909, in tempera on paper, is an example of modernist treatment of children in scenes of melancholy, tension, curiosity, and unfulfilled desire, rather than the idyllic simplicity, joy, hope and innocence of tradition. The message seems to be that women’s creative impulse was often frustrated by the expectation of marriage and producing a family.
Of that ilk is Girl with Child, 1902, by Paula Modersohn-Becker but who was mainly preoccupied with the notion of radical portraits of herself and others – such as Self-portrait as a Standing Nude with Hat, from summer 1906, and Mother with Child on her Arm, Nude II from autumn of that year. More than half of her 60 works of that type were made in Paris from 1906-07. They include Self-portrait with Lemon, oil on cardboard, which is presented in a tall, narrow format and a textured surface recalling Roman-Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits of a kind she saw when visiting the Louvre. Fayum portraits were discovered by modern Europeans late in the 19th century in the Egyptian region of that name. They were painted in the early Christian era on wooden panels from live models and applied to a person’s mummy after his or her death.
In the Louvre Paula had spent hours sketching and studying the Old Masters and ancient Greek and Egyptian art. Seeking to combine the modernity of post-Impressionism with the gravitas of ancient art, she wrote that the Greek head-sculptures and Fayum portraits made her think that “a great simplicity of form is something marvellous.”.
Also in the Louvre, she delighted in the use of colour by Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. Paula went to live and work alongside a colony of artists in Worpswede, a small rural community 15 miles north of her family home in Bremen. There, apart from her time in Paris, she spent much of her life, meeting her future husband Otto Modersohn, and Ottilie Reylaender, whose work also appears in Making Modernism. She thrilled to the natural attractions of the area, but “painting people is really better than painting landscape,” she decided.
In Worpswede, Paula got to know the sculptor Clara Westhoff, who married the renowned Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. Through Rilke both artists visited Auguste Rodin’s studio in Paris. Modersohn-Becker thought Rodin the greatest living artist, and marvelled at his “sense of form,” a quality she transmits in the finely worked surface The Sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff painted in oil on canvas in 1905. Tragically, Paula died a year later at the age of 31, of complications on the birth of her first child.
Professor Price said that throughout the exhibition there was a lot of emotional upheaval, a lot of heartache for these women, “but they do find some peace.”
Captions in detail:
Portrait of Anna Roslund, 1917. By Gabriele Münter. Oil on canvas. Leicester Museums & Galleries. © DACS 2022
Mother pressing her Baby to her, 1925. By Käthe Kollwitz. Crayon on Ingres laid paper. Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne.
The Sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff. By Paula Modersohn-Becker. Oil on canvas, 1905. Hamburger Kunsthalle, acquired in 1920.
Self-portrait by Käthe Kollwitz, 1889. Pen, brush and ink on drawing carton. © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne.
Self-portrait with Lemon, 1906-7. By Paula Modersohn-Becker. Oil tempera on cardboard. Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen, on loan from a private collection.
Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, c 1910. By Erma Bossi. Oil on cardboard, Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich. © The Estate of Erma Bossi.
Cat in a Child’s Arm, c 1903. By Paula Modersohn-Becker. Oil on canvas. Kunsthalle Bremen.
Twins. By Marianne Werefkin. Tempera on paper. Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona.
The Contrasts, 1919. By Marianne Werefkin. Tempera on paper on cardboard. Collection of the Municipality of Ascona, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona.
Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin is at the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries of the Royal Academy, until February 12, 2023.
