Marianne von Werefkin, Autumn (1907)
From her diaries (1905): ‘I am a woman, I lack every [ability for] creation. I can understand everything and cannot create… I don’t have the words to express my ideal. I am looking for the person, the man, who can give this ideal form. As a woman, wanting someone who could give the internal world expression, I met Jawlensky … ‘
I am more a man than a woman. Only the need to please and compassion turn me into a woman. I am not a man, I am not a woman, I am I.
Yet she could write in a letter: My eyes are magical glass [when looking at] the outside world, and it can transform a lot into bewitching beauty. Paris, Munich … they’re all the same. The country is nice, because it is closer to nature and bad because we [Werefkin and Jawlensky] are no longer people from nature. I saw this at Blagodat. The more a person improves himself, the more one is doomed to loneliness. One doesn’t need friends, one needs oneself and anybody who loves you like themselves
Dear friends and readers,
I was wondering how to present my tenth woman artist Marianne von Werekfin as I am so drawn to very specific paintings by her. For example, even in black-and-white one of her pictures remains one of my favorites of all 20th century women’s paintings: are we watching quiet peacefulness or repression with few choices caught up in a harmonious ordered design?
Elsa Honig Fine in her Women and Art describes the painting when seen in color: “All the artist’s sources seem to coalesce …The large green expanses of grass, sinuous blue river and band of red buildings in the background, contrast with the black, white and grey silhouettes of the anonymous strollers. The artist seems more at peace with herself in this painting.
Where better is the darkness, fearful glare and fascinating colors of de-humanized and degraded landscape of unamelioroated industrialism unameliorated expressed than in her
Jordi Vigue in Great Women Masters of Art: ‘There are three motifs in this work: nature, industry and the human being. The industrial village is located on a river. It is surrounded by a powerfully colorist landscape in which the plains taken on a copper tone and the high blue mountains are silhouetted against a yellow and green sky. In the foreground three men carrying a sack across a bridge in front of a village immersed in the twilight. The factory chimney, a symbol of industrialization per excellent, is as high as the old church’s bell tower. This is a narrative scene accompanied by forms with latent meanings. The association of the mangnficence of nature, the darkness of inustry with its chimney emitting green smoke, and the toil of the man bent under a heavy sack are ahead of their time and offer an invitation to reflection.’
In this picture by Werefkin, I think of the many images of lonely old woman carelessly discarded in so much fiction and life. Here the woman seems to matter:
Again Jordi Vigue: ‘Her ideas are expressed in this work in tempera on cardboard, in which the snow covering the hills is green and blue, the furrows and shadows are tinged in red, andthe leafless wintry trees are as black as the phantasmagoric figure of the old lady. In fact, the subject of the painting is simple: an old lady goes to get some pigs that have gotten loose. Nevertheless, the treatment of forms and colors establishes a symbolic relationship with reality that imbues the painting with mystery, like the stories of Poe.’
Werefkin can do the hope of young girls (Autumn, the scene I led with, which reminds me of Bemelmans’ Madeline, books where we read of 12 little girls in a two straight lines), the calm of old age
Here the seeming disorder and beauty and fearfulness of winter worlds, often with a pair of friends or heterosexual couple painted as tiny figures which repeats elsewhere:
Werefkin makes us see war as human beings turned into mindless crawling deadly insects in a row
She paints rather tormented scenes with processions of female figures in black walking on sinuous roads:
From Kochmann (see below): In The Black Women, Werefkin depicts several women dressed in various combinations of black and dark blue garments, tying and carrying white bundles back to a mountain village. The scene is set in the mountains, a line of chalet-style row houses at their base. The women appear to have finished laundering in a thinly rendered purple-colored river, preparing to return home after a hard day’s work … [I add there is an absence of men in many of these pictures]
She can also project the alluring stillness of an evening out in a world of war (note the heterosexual couple):
But a good deal of what Von Werefkin painted is to me also too consciously primitive, crude, glaring and gauche, even cartoon-like, or vague, inconsistent. These are labelled German expressionistic, and hark back to stylistically similar paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, only M-B rescues such pictures by the poignancy of the abject children, animals. Werefkin uses this style for depicting the strength of peasant women and men, and stereotypical 1930s kinds of bars. Two from In the Village:
The Beergarten
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For this blog I am indebted to a friend, Fran, who sent to Women Writers through the Ages (at Yahoo), the URL for an excellent detailed essay by Adrienne Kochmann which is meant to focus on and explain a specific picture. I will quote from Kochmann to provide biography: “Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin’s Return Home, c. 1909:”
Werefkin was born in 1860 in Tula, south of Moscow.8 An aristocrat and a baroness, she was the daughter of Elizabeth Daragan, an artist, and Vladimir Nikolaevich Verevkin, an infantry commander general who had been decorated by the tsar for his accomplishments during the Crimean War. During her childhood, her father’s military career transferred the family to several different residences across the Russian Empire, including (chronologically) Vitebsk in Russia, Vilnius in Lithuania, Lublin in Poland, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. She began her formal art training at the age of fourteen and later studied with the prominent Russian Realist Ilya Repin for ten years.
Through Repin, Werefkin met Jawlensky in 1892. The two shared mutual artistic interests and worked together, spending summers at Werefkin’s family’s landed estate, Blagodat, in Kovno Province, Lithuania. Werefkin established a reputation in Russia as the “Russian Rembrandt” showing her portraits—her primary subject area—at such exhibitions as the First Women Artists Circle Exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1886, the XX Peredvizhnik Exhibition of 1892, also in St. Petersburg, and in 1896 at the art section of the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhni-Novgorod.
So she belonged to the lesser nobility, with her mother an amateur painter; early on she met a man she seems to have idolized and with whom she would have (for her time) an unconventional passionate relationship for 30 years:
A pastoral painting of herself and Jawlensky in their happiest phase
By 1896 they were living in an artist community in Munich, friends with Munter and her partner, Vasily Kanddinsky, and part of movement which included many new and avante garde artists (Munich New Artists Association):
Kochman: In 1896, Werefkin’s father died and, provided that she stay a single woman, allowed her an inheritance of a government pension and the financial means to live independently. That same year, she and Jawlensky moved to Munich and took up residence in adjoining apartments on Giselastrasse in Schwabing, the home of the city’s Eastern European immigrant and artistic populations. There, they became active members of Munich’s avant-garde artistic community, and befriended the prominent Slovenian art teacher Anton Azbe, in whose teaching atelier Jawlensky, Igor Grabar, and Dmitrii Kardovskii, Werefkin’s friends from the St. Petersburg Art Academy, enrolled as students. Werefkin herself, in 1897, formed the St. Lukas Brotherhood, an informal artists’ salon which met at her apartment.
She and Jawlensky became part of an international exhibition society, Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).
Marianne von Werefkin as painted by her colleague and friend, Gabriel Munter
1902 was a time of personal crisis; a child was born out of wedlock to a long-time female servant in the house and Jawlensky fathered it. (This reminds me of a child born in Italy when Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley were living there with Byron and Clare Clairmont; it may have been Shelley’s by a maid servant.) Werefkin kept a dairy in French, published many years later, Lettres a un Inconnu, 1901-1905, mostly about art: there she asserted the principle of art seen as a kind of expression of one’s soul or of the internal world.
Kochman: Although Werefkin remained active in the avant-garde art community, she took a ten-year hiatus from painting between 1896 and 1906. The break in artistic production has been traditionally attributed to the attention she gave to advancing Jawlensky’s career, but it is also apparent that she needed the time to develop a new artistic language, as she moved away from the Realist style which had dominated her work in Russia.
She had a more personal style than these other people, seems to have felt her as a Russian ex-aristocrat something of an outsider. Here is a letter she wrote to her brother, Peter, after a visit back to Kovno in Russia: she looks at the city like as if she is making one of her paintings and reacts in an intensely ravaged way, both feeling revulsion from and in love with what she sees:
Convince yourself. Kovno is a treasure-trove for artists. It is gloomy, the lamps don’t make it lighter and the streets are getting darker. Their violet windows hover threateningly in the darkness. The elusive lines of low houses, on them—the glimmer of green and red flames—illuminating rows of shops. Bright green bright red stripes [all] fall on the violet sidewalk. And all those shadows are full of people who only speak about one thing, about love, in the dialect, Polish or broken Russian. Whispers and loud words touch the silence, like the green and red bands of light—the darkness of the night. Something terrible, terrible lies over everything, I feel a shudder, it seems I am in another world, far away from real life. I save myself in a church. Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons. One sings everything that one has sung before in the past. Some black figures—and the heart is heavy. The tears take one’s breath away and the past rises up again. Home…In Peter’s office, my entire soul starts to ache for him, for that battle for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life. Empty, empty in the house, no one. Whoever comes—doesn’t get his fill of him. And then such a heated rush of love rips out of the [visitor’s] heart, begging one’s pardon and forgetting the trouble behind, that the whole house swells. And I go to my room and stretch out my arms to the West—that it is far away [from here], that I will someday return. Outside those painful sensations—it is horrible to be before these people and their lives. Service and family troubles—a hard beginning, pay raise, promotion—sweet dreams, scandal—daily bread, and their happiness reminds me sweetly, of those who buy “for the people,” and whose food you wouldn’t put in your mouth. I think of Munich and of my health. All that is here is suffering and this horror of beauty and this horrible life and this overbearing literature, and the complete superfluousness of art.
Note how her father forbad her to marry on pain of losing her inheritance: he feared who she would marry. From her diary we can see how insecure she felt as a woman; that she had to try to see herself as man to justify her art. Yet her pictures are meant to be of ordinary people in familiar acts of everyday life. One reviewer at the time said of Werefkin’s pictures that “she catches quick, transitory moods, but beyond mere narrative, she creates rhythmic arrangements by large, strongly outlined color planes that cut into each other.” Werefkin did not date her paintings and they are dated by trying to trace her stylistic changes.
My sources were very vague about an illegitimate child that was born to a servant in her household, Jawlensky was the father: Fran has told the full story clearly in her comments. Perhaps reading Werefkin’s letters, her diary or about her friend, Gabriel Munter, a great painter in her own right (187701962) would turn up more information of about this private agon.
This rare photo of her, cheerful and unpretentious can startle someone who has been imagining her through her paintings alone — it comes from her later years and like Munter’s depiction of her can reassure us a bit
Werefkin seems to have stopped painting again in 1914 (having escaped the war to Switzerland); and broke off from Jawlensky in 1922 after 30 years of life together (again see the comments on this eventually cruel destructive partner). Honig writes that there are very few paintings from these later years; many disappeared shortly after her death in Ascona on 6 February 1938. Vigue says that Werefkin was rediscovered in the 1950s in Rome and Basel by the curator of the Wiesbaden Museum of Art at the time, Clemens Weiler. There is now a Von Werefkin Museum in Ascona, Switzerland.
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Adrienne Kochman concentrates on the above painting at length — giving me the feeling that she too is drawn to certain specific pictures: I summarize and paraphrase: Werefkin’s work has “largely been defined by scholars in terms of her associations with Russian literary Symbolism and the Symbolist work of such French artists as Paul Gauguin, Paul Sérusier, and Emile Bernard.” But if she used their techniques (“flattened areas of color, highly saturated hues, and outlined forms”), she was painting about her German experience from the point of view of a Russian woman. She had had a successful career in Russia before she moved to Munich and then she was immersed in the Munich avante-garde. in her painting, as well as personal documents recording her interest in color, have directed analyses of her art in this manner. Werefkin’s artistic concerns however, were also filtered through the lens of her experience in Germany and her native Russian ethnicity. She led a successful artistic career in her Russian homeland in the late 1880s and early 1890s before resettling in Munich in 1896, and was actively engaged in that city’s avant-garde community, and cared about socio-political issues, the failure of the tsarist regime, the coming Russian revolution, the coming European conflagration.
The painting depicts some fifteen women walking down a city street in an unidentified urban setting. Street lamps provide some illumination in an orange-purple sky, casting irregular shadows on the buildings which line the sidewalk. All of the women wear black, shapeless, often hooded garments. They walk in a loose procession down the street alone and in pairs. Their movements appear heavy and slow-paced as they go laden with a child in arm, baskets full of goods and/or large white bundles. Their return home from marketing or laundering appears to be a regular if not daily ritual. The scene is haunting …One might read the red glow within the interior of each door as a suggestion that the home is the traditional center of love, hearth and passion—the domestic sphere dominated by women. The public space of the street outside the protected space of the interior is occupied by masculinized women. And yet, even the space of the street bears qualities of being a place “in between”—where these women are protected and somewhat enclosed. The high flattened walls flanking the low, red- lit buildings block the street from harsher natural elements, such as wind, suggesting there is an expanse beyond the geographic space of the picture plane which is even more raw. It is in this larger area that the world of men is located; it is the space where war is fought and men’s lives are lost.
Kochmann feels Werefkin felt her status as an unmarried woman from an imperialist background. Obviously she found the cityscape deeply “un-home-y” in Freud’s sense, haunting, eerie, disquieting. Her pictures are often of women as beasts of burden at the same time as the rhetoric she heard around her was deeply misogynistic: a woman artist was a “”manwoman;” they had gone against nature, [were] shirking their responsibility as wives and mothers. Around this time she also painted Black Women (see above) and Twins
In black, formless, hiding their sexuality, a kind of widowhood (regarded perhaps as shameful: to me there seems much self-hatred here:
From Kochmann: Two women dressed in mourning sit on a bench holding twin babies in their laps. The babies, contently swaddled in white, form a stark contrast to the women, whose strained grimaces suggest the hardship of raising children alone and the pain of losing a spouse. Werefkin suggests the cycle of life, as the babies come to represent the future and continuation of the family, the women situated in the middle as bringing up the children, and the deceased fathers, as part of the past.
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I found helpful a stirring perceptive essay on recent paintings in the NYRB by Jed Pert, “The Perils of Painting Now 62:14 (Sept 24, 2015):55-57, where Perl argues that all paintings are timebound, the general pictorial style of an age a mirror of contemporary turmoil through which the individual artist expresses sincere private feelings and emotions, what matters (he follows Trilling in his essay on “Sincerity and Authenticity”) is how the artist expresses his or her inner experiences, the ambiguities of personal life through a social medium; time-bound styles are public social avowals through which an autonomous self expresses a vision. Yes, this is so for Werefkin.
Yet when we look at the paintings of Werefkin’s years once she goes to Munich they speak to our immediate time: the women are perpetual émigrés, outside the emotional and geographical circle of home — rather like Werefkin. There is Kochmann’s reading of the bereft sense in Return Home: not belonging anywhere; she is no longer part of, a long way from Sunday Afternoon in Spring. She paints pictures as as fearful and nightmarish as Munch’s The Scream, yet more engulfing, a maelstrom:
But maybe she was not bereft. Maybe she was relieved not to have to belong. If what was on offer for the outsider couple was not any kind of Arcadia, it was better than what was experienced inside these circles and lines of people. Here is her couple grown out now old in a Turner-like landscape:
This is Jawlensky’s insightful picture of Werefkin in her prime: look at the expression on her face:
Werefkin’s of a friend, Rosalie Leiss, painted in the same style, only using lines much much more:
Ellen
Kochmann’s essay contains extensive notes and a bibliography. Also found openly online is “Töchter of Feminism: Germany and the Modern Woman Artist” by Diane Radycki. In this essay Radycki presents the somewhat perverse theory that Germany was a particularly inspiring place for women artists (far more early 20th century expressionist women artists worked there than in France) because women were not allowed much freedom in schools; that they were ignored liberated them seems to be her idea.
Thus far:
Caterina Van Hemmesen (1527/8-1581)
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652)
Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757)
Francois Duparc (1726-1778)
Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818)
Rosa Brett (1829-1882)
Helen Allingham (1848-1926)
Elizabeth Adela Armstrong Forbes (1859-1912)
Marianne Von Werefkin (1860-1938)
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1909)
I want to do two more 20th century woman artists, Isabel Bishop (1902-88) and Nell Blaine (1922-1996) before rewinding back to the Renaissance. I have discovered (no surprise to me) that among the neglected or or paid sufficient attention or respect to, I love best later 19th into early to pre-1950s women artists.
I find Werefkin’s paintings compelling and am glad you showed so many. It’s also interesting that Werefkin, like Woolf, had an independent income, in Werefkin’s case, from age 36, and thus the “room of her own.”
I too enjoyed your blog about Werefkin, Ellen. You noted in it that Werefkin had a 10-year period in which she didn’t paint, in part, your source mentioned, because she was supporting her partner’s career (and also because she was needing to let new ideas form and coalesce about her painting). But I wanted to stop on supporting her partner, as I am reading Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. I find it quite a powerful book. Although I am past the time when a husband could abandon me with school age children, I could easily imagine myself experiencing the kind of almost inchoate rage the protag. feels when he husband leaves her for a younger woman. “Abandonment” is the apt word–divorce, too clinical a term, doesn’t cover it. But to return to Werefkin. Ferrante’s character feels so acutely the loss of self–the parts of herself–she has poured into her husband. She makes a list of everything “he owed me” (she dares to think that) and thinks “I had taken away from my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.” The line struck me so forcefully that I highlighted it. In any case, I thought of those 10 years when Werefkin wasn’t painting and found it reasonable to imagine she might say she had, “taken away from my own time, and added it to his to make him more powerful.”
Many good points. She could not have begun to live the life she had without that sustainer. It gave her liberty and courage and time …
The utterance where she values his work more than hers, where she says she is a man inside a woman (that idea goes back to Aphra Behn), is poignant. Days of Abandonment gets at the core of what a woman experiences who loved a man, trusted gave her life to him in founding herself on his continuing love for her, and then he deserts. I wrote a blog on the novel:
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/elena-ferrantes-days-of-abandonment/
I’m now reading and listening to Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and find it a falling away — not quite so spot on as the first novel. A woman’s book dialoguing with other women, yes. More a depiction of an Italian milieu in Naples. I’ll perhaps blog about it eventually.
Men and women who love and live together as partners/spouses do give power to one another; they can also sabotage and destroy, and take take take and then desert. There seems to be an agon of a story about a child in Werefkin’s case, a sexual betrayal with a servant which bothered Werefkin because the woman was a servant (beneath her).
On the number of images: my rationales for these blogs is I have so many books, and in my art collection some of them have many reproductions. So I’m sharing what would remain unknown. Jim is not here to look at them with me any more.
I very much enjoyed reading your blog and seeing its illustrations, some well known, some new to me, but there are just a couple of things to mention. The first is a little typo: the famous Munich-based movement she and Jawlensky were initiially involved in is called Der blaue Reiter in German (The Blue Rider).
The others concern biography: Werefkin didn’t have an illegitimate child as far as I know. According to the art books I have, a 9 or 10-year-old girl named Helene Nesnakomoff had been taken into her father’s household as a servant girl in 1895 when the mother, an alcohlic widow, had proved incapable of looking after her own children. When Werefkin’s father died in 1896, the child became her responsibility.
It’s not quite clear exactly when Jawlensky started an affair with the young girl, but he’d got her pregnant with Andreas by the time she was 16. They covered up the scandal by telling friends he was a nephew, then ended up in a kind of increasingly unhappy ménage à trois, with all of them living off Werefkins’s money until she lost nearly all of it as a result of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It was then that Jawlensky started latching onto another meal ticket, Emma Scheyer, and made plans to marry Helene, though that wouldn’t actually happen until 1922 and the final break with Werefkin. He was *not* a nice man, especially as he left Werefkin in fairly dire financial straits, whilst merrily profiting himself from Scheyer and her monied connections.
Oddly, it’s around the time that Helene made her evidently fateful entrance to the household that Werefkin more or less stopped painting and concentrated on furthering Jawlensky’s career even more intensely than she’d already done so. Some say it was the result of painter’s block, exacerbated by problems with the 1888 hunting injury that had left her painting hand partially crippled; others that it was with the idea that she could stave off Jawlensky’s increasing artistic jealously and keep him by being sacrificially more womanly supportive and less of a ‘manwoman’, whilst he himself would become the vicarious vessel and outlet for her own artistic programme and ambitions. It didn’t quite work out that way to say the least, especially since Jawlensky was happy to be kept, but not led by her. Not unsurprisingly, the last known painting before her long dry spell is an unfinished one of Jawlensky.
Tellingly, her own initially tentative and doubting return to active painting more or less started after Andreas’ birth in 1902, when Jawlensky was himself turning even more to Helene and his new child. A kind of self-help pact with another sensitive artist friend, caricaturist Alexander Salzmann, who was steadily drinking himself to death, led to them both going off to Normandy in 1903 to rehabilitate in their own separate ways, and from then on Werefkin slowly, but gradually found her own artistic medium again.
I quite like some, if not all, of the more primitive and naive-seeming, folk-art inspired paintings that I’ve seen by her. She had had an early interest in such painting in her own homeland Russia and became influenced by it again when she came into contact with Bavarian folk art with its votive and reverse glass paintings during her Munich and Murnau periods. She also decorated her home with some folk-art-influenced pieces: the exhibition of her work I saw last year also included some of this furniture by Elena Dimitrieva Polenova. You can see the exhibits if you scroll down this page:
I was occasionally unexpectedly reminded of Lowry’s primitive-inspired industrial paintings in that exhibition, though I’m not aware of any direct links of influence between the two.
http://tinyurl.com/oaneofr
As you can also see, that room had quotes from her ‘Lettres à un inconnu’ the diaries you mention at the beginning. They seem to have helped her formulate many of her artistic thoughts and theories, especially during the time she doesn’t seem to have actively painted.
Fran
Again thank you — profusely — Fran. You much improved my blog on Modersohn-Beck with the photo of the grave monument of herself and her daughter. To say the truth, what was holding up this blog was I wanted her to be my early to mid-20th century candidate and I knew that the way the child and Jawlensky’s liaison with the servant were discussed was worse than obfuscating. I recognized the same kinds of insinuations, prevarications, slurs that occur when people tell of a child born in Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s household: whose was it? Mary or a woman servant in the house? Was Percy the father? what happened to the child? did the baby die like all but one of Mary’s children. Recognizing the pattern and seeming to remember the threads we had I still didn’t have enough confidence — I don’t read German nor Russian.
Jawlensky seems to have been the bastard outlined in Days of Abandonment — actually worse if we think geniuses are somehow more important in their grief: from the point of view of the long partnership, she gave up so much of her gifts to his art. I didn’t know he also fleeced her; nor that he married later. Awful — especially looking at her statements about him and herself as artists.
I did feel that photo of her looking so cheerful was reassuring — I had an idea the last years were very hard.
To use Greer’s formulation, in this case the Obstacle was the man who she depended on as an enabler psychologically. There is a hideous kind of sexual preying on women in Augustus John’s triple menagerie where he destroys two potential women artists. That’s written about in Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! and Margaret Foster in her novel on Gwen John (another turn of the 19th into 20th century woman painter).
I have a tendency not to like the primitive: I never did teach some of the older epics, but would “go” for Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil. Probably this predilection leads to my liking 18th century art so much. I have said another problem for my project is that I don’t like some of the recent modern art: the performative which is so distressing is to me problematic, the presentation of women’s bodies not just as they are, but downright grotesque. I can “do” Kahlo or Varo but another idea I had was to highlight the lesser known. I can go for American artists of the 1930s — I have a book just on them and am thinking of choosing one of them before “giving” in to the apparent peacefulness of Nell Blaine. I have to have enough pictures: I was stifled over the 19th century impressionist Fanny Chudleigh because I couldn’t locate enough pictures — so one is thrown back on what was popular and successful in the marketplace — Allingham, Forbes. Happily I like their paintings 🙂
Far fewer are clicking on Werekfin than Allingham, and when they do click, they click only once often. Not many times (called “visitors”). Werefkin’s art is still not popular — sentiment is what’s wanted, validation of what seems to be from public media or what people can let themselves see of their lives. All the more reason to put her here with all the images.
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But I’ll plug on. Why not share what is in my books with someone? why not try to bring women artists ignored or dissed or marginalized to the fore where I can even if I don’t have original primary sources, can make mistakes too. Right now I’m working on a paper on Anne Hunter and Anne Grant where I have no mistakes but have not done the kind of research I did for say Anne Murray Halkett, but again I am not as drawn to them as I was to this later 17th century Scots (again Scots, hybrid identity) autobiographer.
And I’m tried, without Jim it’s different. I need to go out so cannot bury myself away in libraries even if I could reach them.
Ellen
Well, I certainly enjoy your blogs, and you’ve often introduced me to artists I probably wouldn’t have otherwise come across, which I greatly appreciate, as do others, as you’ve seen.
The Werefkin exhibition in Bietigheim, which was later shown at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, too, was all the more interesting because it showed her work together with that of some of the other artists, friends and colleagues from the various circles she’d been a member of, especially Der blaue Reiter and Der große Bär (The Big Bear). Jawlewnsky was there, of course, but only slightly represented – Werefkin fans hold grudges:) – and there were quite a few other female artists who have found renewed late interest such as Elisabeth Epstein, Erma Bossi, Carla Pohle or Natalia Goncharova.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of the other women shown, Gabriele Münter and Maria Marc, were, rather like Werefkin, initially probably much better known for who they were partnered with, Kandinsky and Franz Marc respectively, than as artists in their own right, and the surviving body of Clara Marc’s work is still much thinner. She was another who concentrated more on furthering her lover and later husband’s career than her own, even beyond his death in the First World War.
Elsa Lasker-Schüler was also represented through some of her typical drawings and sketches, but she really was a much better poet than artist in my view.
As for the business of Jawlensky’s affair with Helene, it is very difficult to get hold of the facts since Münter and Jawlensky apparently even lied to their friends about it. The biographical details given in the very good exhibition catalogue I have do seem very well researched, though, and are borne out by other accounts I’ve read. One such even asserts that Jawlensky abused Helene from the moment she entered the household as a young child, but I’m not at all sure how true that is – as I said, Jawlensky is not popular with the Werefkin crew – but she wasn’t exactly old when he got her pregnant either.
If he did do that and Werefkin knew about it and tolerated it, I can imagine that might well have caused such an artistic block as well, but I’ve never actually seen that posited as one of the explanations for it. I was just struck by the parallels in dates when I was checking them for that email and then came across this mention of early abuse in an online bio. Who knows?
Fran
First encouraged by Fran and Diane and the rise in clicks over the last couple of days, I’ve hunted out and found another survey book I had forgotten about: one with essays on the individuals; Eleanor Munro’s Originals: Women Artists, the sort of book I would buy “on spec” from the Strand when Jim and I were there in NYC for a visit. I’d feel guilty as for example, this one was heavy and not cheap. But it has provided many a picture here a few years ago: it’s early-mid 20th century American women artists (Dorothea Tanning is one). These are indeed some of them forgotten — don’t make the surveys which tend to be European oriented. So I’ll have someone soon between Blaine and Werefkin.
Without knowing as many details as Fran provided, I just felt that Werefkin’s own conduct would not stand any kind of hostile scrutiny: there was a sense in something I read she was ever so unfair to the servant and it was Jawlensky, the egalitarian you see, who was kind to this girl. And I can see that she would be more appalled because of her background: look who is preferred to her? No one in English mentions he fleeced her.
Good catalogue exhibition books are priceless — they justify the exhibition itself too.
I remember when we talked of Georgia O’Keefe and Fran put a number of images into the blog, I learned that she owed a lot to the art dealer Stieglitz, himself a photographer, and her husband eventually. But how she lived way apart from him eventually and recently in Lisa Moore’s book that she has lesbian lovers-companions herself. So she too needed a man in the man’s world; she is probably better known than he because of the sexual nature of her images.
I live on Jim’s pension :), gained respectability as wife and mother. We can’t escape the patriarchy — thus Austen’s little romance fables of kind good protective rich handsome men do not lose their fantasy appeal. Mansfield Park doesn’t appeal because neither Edmund nor Henry Crawford can be made to fit 🙂
[…] Rosa Brett (1829-1882) Helen Allingham (1848-1926) Elizabeth Adela Armstrong Forbes (1859-1912) Marianne Von Werefkin (1860-1938) Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1909) Isabel Bishop (1902-1988) Nell Blaine […]
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! STUNNING, POWERFUL WORK!!
[…] are depressive. Kahlo’s famous “women as a broken column” is typical. I take Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938) and Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) to have escaped this prison by using large political events […]