This is one of those wonderful, idiosyncratic exhibitions that Art Blart has always liked to promote: small, occluded histories that have great importance to local people; spaces and histories that deserve to be acknowledged in a wider sphere; microcosms of everyday life, work and encounters expanded into the macrocosm of the universe, making us aware of the importance of the seemingly in/consequential in this dance of death we call life.
“This exhibition delves into how these spaces have fostered social and cultural exchange since the 19th century, becoming living capsules of history and community. They reflect the complexities of urban life, showcasing how people shape their surroundings and creating a unique atmosphere that has long inspired artists.” (Press release)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum Ephraim-Palais for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Hans Baluschek (German, 1870-1935) Fleisch am Knochen (Meat on the Bone) Berlin, 1924 Pen and black ink on paper 27.7cm x 35.2cm Collection of the Berlin City Museum Foundation Reproduction: Michael Setzpfandt, Berlin
Heinrich Zille (German, 1858-1929) “Eine kleine Freundin hat doch jedermann, eine kleine Freundin braucht man dann und wann…” (“Everyone has a little friend, and one needs a little friend now and then…”) Berlin, 1924 Lithograph on laid paper 45.5cm x 36.8cm Collection of the Berlin City Museum Foundation
Ever wondered about the secret lives tucked away behind Berlin’s bustling streets?
The Museum Ephraim-Palais is inviting you on a captivating journey with its new exhibition, “Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters,” running from July 18, 2025, to January 18, 2026.
From cozy residential nooks to bustling commercial hubs and serene artist retreats, Berlin’s courtyards tell the vibrant story of a city constantly evolving. This exhibition delves into how these spaces have fostered social and cultural exchange since the 19th century, becoming living capsules of history and community. They reflect the complexities of urban life, showcasing how people shape their surroundings and creating a unique atmosphere that has long inspired artists.
“Berlin Courtyards” brings together nearly 100 striking photographs and graphics from the vast collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Visitors will discover gems from legendary artists like Heinrich Zille, Hans Baluschek, and Manfred Hamm, alongside contemporary perspectives from photographers like André Kirchner and Günther Steffen.
Adding a fresh layer to the historical narrative are new artistic works by urban researchers Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah, specially commissioned for the show. Their multi-sensory exploration of Wedding’s backyards, using texts, photos, videos, and sound, offers an intimate look at these overlooked spaces.
What’s more, the exhibition features a dynamic display of modern-day Berlin courtyards, crowdsourced through the Stadtmuseum Berlin’s “Berlin now!” photo campaign. You’ll see 40 framed photos on the walls, plus 50 smaller photo cards that visitors can rearrange, literally co-creating the exhibition experience. Due to overwhelming interest, the “Berlin now!” photo call has been extended until September 18, giving photography enthusiasts more time to submit their own unique views of Berlin’s courtyards. Selected photos will even be rotated into the framed display in October!
Adding another exciting dimension, junior curators from the Refik-Veseli School in Kreuzberg, mentored by Yella Hoepfner, will share their own “courtyard stories” across five dedicated areas within the Museum Ephraim-Palais, including spaces within the “BerlinZEIT” permanent exhibition. Their personal narratives will engage in a dialogue with objects from the Stadtmuseum Berlin’s collection, offering fresh, youthful insights.
Don’t miss this chance to experience Berlin from a new perspective, delving into the hidden heart of its neighborhoods through the eyes of both historical and contemporary artists.
Press release from Museum Ephraim-Palais
Rudolf Dührkoop (German, 1848-1918) From the portfolio Das malerische Berlin, Band 1 (Picturesque Berlin, Volume 1) 1911
Unknown photographer Hoffest in der Falckensteinstraße 27 (Garden festival at Falckensteinstraße 27) 1920 Postcard From the collection of Eberhard Müller
Installation views of the exhibition Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin, July 2025 – January 2026 Photos: Alexander Rentsch
Berlin backyards have a lot to tell. Since the industrial revolution in the 19th century at the latest, Berlin has been a center of attraction for people from other regions of Germany and from other countries. The history of the city has therefore always been a history of migration.
Due to enormous population growth, spatial expansion and structural densification, Berlin is characterised by backyards like no other city. They are used for residential, educational, commercial, artistic, culinaric and many other purposes. Their history is diverse, just like the people who live there. With the special exhibition “Berliner Höfe” (Berlin Backyards) on the 3rd floor of the Museum Ephraim-Palais, the Stadtmuseum Berlin invites you to explore these urban spaces between past and present.
The backyards are exemplary of urban coexistence with all its contradictions. They show how people shape space. And they encourage us to take a closer look: What can backyards tell us about Berlin? What about ourselves? In short: What is going on there?
Graphics, photography and history
The special atmosphere of the Berlin backyards has repeatedly inspired graphic artists, draughtsmen and photographers to create images. In the exhibition, highlights from the museum collection meet the artistic works of urban researchers Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah, which were created especially for “Berliner Höfe”. Using sounds and light, they deal with different sensory impressions from backyards that Örs and Varatharajah encountered in Wedding.
In addition, the junior curators from the Refik Veseli School in Kreuzberg and their mentor Yella Hoepfner present their own spaces in the permanent exhibition “BerlinZEIT” on the first and second floors of the museum. Their individual stories interact with objects from the collection.
Biographical data
Duygu Örs is a researcher, art educator and curator specialising in cultural and urban research. Since 2019 she has headed the education and mediation work of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, since 2025 with Jas Wenzel. At the Institute for Sociology and Cultural Organisation (ISKO) at Leuphana University Lüneburg, she is working on the role of the museum in the ‘Right to the City’ movement. She is also a co-founder of the curatorial research collective Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC). Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Sinthujan Varatarajah (சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா) writes and researches in Berlin. As a political geographer, Varatarajah focuses on issues of statelessness, im-/mobility and displacement from the perspective of infrastructure, logistics and building culture. Varatarajah has published several books since 2022. Varatarajah’s next book, ‘Where Time Stands Still’, will be published by Carl Hanser Verlag in spring 2026.
“Although these artists were explicitly not dealing with mundane reality but instead with what lies beneath, behind and in-between, the still relatively new medium of photography was of great importance for many. Last but not least, they also used it to make visible what remains hidden to the naked eye without technical means: the distant, the tiny, the moving.” (Press release)
Expressing the unconscious mind through illogical, dreamlike imagery and ideas, exploring the irrational, challenging notions of reality through a technical instrument – the camera – to create “a rich and multifarious cosmos of idiosyncratic realities that radically transcended traditional aesthetics.”
In the dream of the mind and the camera’s eye. Over and above the real.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Fotografie for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The invention of modern photomontage in the early twentieth century by Max Ernst with his Dada colleagues Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann established new history in a variety of ways. Expanding modern art with multimedia as well as placing found photographs into art cut from printed magazines, rather than chemical made prints from the darkroom. Redefining final works of art without the paint brush or canvas. Ernst freed imagery into the unconscious by self-made combinations of drawing with torn and pasted photographic fragments, evoking memories and other responses by viewers that continue today.”
Steve Yates, Fulbright scholar, photographic artist, author and curator
Max Ernst holds a prominent position within Dada and Surrealist Art. His name stands for genre-bending works that combine dream and reality. The exhibition FOTOGAGA: Max Ernst and Photography. A Visit from the Würth Collection is the first to search for points of intersection between his work and photography. Commemorating Surrealism’s centenary, the Museum für Fotografie (Museum of Photography) is showing a representative overview of Max Ernst’s artworks from the Würth Collection. These are complemented by works from the Kunstbibliothek, Kupferstichkabinett, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and other exceptional loans from museums and private collections in France and Germany.
Max Ernst and Photography – A Special Connection
The art of Max Ernst (1891-1976) was created at a time characterised by a new, creative approach to photography. Snapshots, scientific photographs and images of war machinery inspired him and served as working materials, especially for his collages. Technical and artistic developments in the medium of photography significantly influenced his work. He used photographic reproduction techniques to increase the visual impact of his works: enlargements allowed his small-format collages to hold their own alongside paintings in exhibitions; the production of photo postcards of the collages ensured that the works could be distributed quickly and easily; and the inversion of the tonal values in a photogram enhanced the effect of his frottages.
Max Ernst himself never used a camera for his art, but he liked to pose for the camera, whether for images taken by well-known photographers or made in photo booths. At times serious, at times a little “gaga”, the portraits illustrate not just the artist’s love for playfulness but also an occasionally strategic use of photography to promote his artistic agenda. The title of the exhibition – “FOTOGAGA” – is derived from a group of works by Hans Arp and Max Ernst, which they called “FATAGAGA”: the “FAbrication de TAbleaux GAsométriques Garantis (Fabrication of Guaranteed Gasometric Images)”. One of these photocollages, in which the two artists address their relationship as friends, can be seen in the exhibition.
A Century of Surrealism
Some 270 works will be exhibited, primarily works on paper but also paintings by Max Ernst and photographs, photograms, collages, and illustrated books by his Surrealist contemporaries. Although these artists were explicitly not dealing with mundane reality but instead with what lies beneath, behind and in-between, the still relatively new medium of photography was of great importance for many. Last but not least, they also used it to make visible what remains hidden to the naked eye without technical means: the distant, the tiny, the moving.
Max Ernst’s works are framed within the context of both contemporary and historical references. There are numerous and surprising parallels to photographs by other artists. An avid delight in experimentation and a creative game played with chance characterise the works selected for the exhibition. Their originators reflected on forgotten photographic processes from the 19th century and developed new techniques using light-sensitive materials. Semi-automatic methods, working with found objects, unusual combinations, and the blurring of traces have equally shaped the work of Max Ernst and the photographic oeuvres of many of his contemporaries and other artists that followed. Even a century after André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto on 15 October 1924, they have not lost any of their fascination.
A cooperation with tradition
The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin look back on a longstanding cooperation with the Würth Collection. FOTOGAGA: Max Ernst and Photography is the fourth exhibition in a series that began in 2019‒2020 with Anthony Caro: The Last Judgement Sculpture from the Würth Collection at the Gemä-ldegalerie. It was followed in 2021‒2022 by Illustrious Guests: Treasures from the Kunstkammer Würth in the Kunstgewerbemuseum and David Hockney – Landscapes in Dialogue. “The Four Seasons” from the Würth Collection in 2022, also shown at the Gemäldegalerie. The exhibition at the Museum für Fotografie draws on the Würth Collection’s extensive holdings, especially of Max Ernst’s graphic works, which are now being shown in Berlin for the first time.
Press release from the Museum für Fotografie
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Above the Clouds Midnight Passes 1920 Photographic enlargement of a collage and ink, facsimile, 2024 73 x 55cm Kunsthaus Zürich Public domain
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) The broken marriage 1925 Photomontage 16.5 x 12.2cm Sammlung Siegert, München Public domain
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) The Stall of the Sphinx 1925 Pencil on paper 16.4 x 15.2cm Sammlung Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Little Tables around the Earth (Petites tables autour de la terre) 1926 From Natural History (Histoire naturelle) Collotype of a frottage 50 x 32.5 cm (sheet) Paris: Éditions Jeanne Bucher Portfolio with 34 collotypes of frottages 51.7 x 35 x 1cm
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Cactus 1929 Silver gelatin paper 12.4 x 17.3cm
“The object, which, in its surroundings, is never seen other than in its most mundane aspect, is given new life when isolated in the lens of the viewfinder. […] It seemed to me that the clarity of a constructed form, when removed from its overly distracting surroundings, could be depicted convincingly through the use of photography.”
~ Aenne Biermann
Max Ernst (1891–1976) Quiétude from The Hundred-Headless Woman 1929 Collage novel with 147 reproductions of collages Paris: Éditions du Carrefour 25 x 19cm
The Hundred Headless Woman is Ernst’s first collage novel. It features a loosely narrative sequence of uncanny Surrealist collages, made by cutting up and reassembling nineteenth-century illustrations, accompanied by Ernst’s equally strange captions. Ernst’s French title, La Femme 100 têtes, is a double entendre; when read aloud it can be understood as either “the hundred-headed woman” or “the headless woman.” Along with this enigmatic title character, the book marks the introduction of Ernst’s favourite alter ego, Loplop, “the Bird Superior.” Ernst was deeply engaged with illustrated books during the 1930s; in addition to collage novels, he created many etchings and lithographs to complement the poems and stories of Surrealist writers with whom he was closely associated.
Gallery label from Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018 on the MoMA website Nd [online] Cited 31/03/2025
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Loplop presents the members of the Surrealist group 1931 Reproduction of a collage in Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, No. 4 27.4 x 19.9cm
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) / Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) Aveux non avenus / Disavowals (frontispiece) 1930 Paris: Éditions du Carrefour Book with 11 heliogravures of collages 22 x 17 x 2.8cm Sammlung Siegert, München
Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1910-1985) The Battle of the Penthesilea II 1937 Photomontage, silver gelatin paper 18 x 24.2cm Sammlung Siegert, München
Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of the most important representatives of Dadaism and Surrealism, two artistic movements that turned traditional norms on their head from the 1920s onwards. His boundary-crossing works combine dream and reality. His art also was created at a time characterized by a new, creative approach to photography. Snapshots, scientific photographs and images of war machinery inspired him and served as working materials, especially for his collages. Although he never used a camera for his art himself, technical and artistic developments in the medium of photography significantly influenced his work. Last but not least, Max Ernst liked to pose for the camera, whether for images taken by well-known photographers or made in photo booths.
Some 270 works will be exhibited, primarily works on paper but also paintings by Max Ernst and photographs, photograms, collages, and illustrated books by his Surrealist contemporaries. Although these artists were explicitly not dealing with mundane reality but instead with what lies beneath, behind and in-between, the still relatively new medium of photography was of great importance for many. Last but not least, they also used it to make visible what remains hidden to the naked eye without technical means: the distant, the tiny, the moving.
Max Ernst’s works are framed within the context of both contemporary and historical references. There are numerous and surprising parallels to photographs by other artists. Semi-automatic methods, working with found objects, unusual combinations, and the blurring of traces have equally shaped the work of Max Ernst and the photographic oeuvres of many of his contemporaries and other artists that followed. Even a century after André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto on 15 October 1924, they have not lost any of their fascination.
Gazes and Visions
The Motif of the Eye as a Surrealist Symbol
For the Surrealists, free, wild seeing opened up perspectives on an untamed world beyond reality – provided that the eyes were used in the right way or equipped with appropriate devices. Thus the motif of the eye symbolizes the translation of visions into perceptible images. Max Ernst’s frottages show radically enlarged, wide-open eyes hovering over a flat horizon. Visionary seeing can also be assisted by various instruments. In a coloured collage for Les malheurs des immortels, a young man gazes through two pipes, cheeks flushed with excitement: what might he be looking at?
The focus on inner vision becomes the theme of a 1929 collage, in which the portrait photos of the Surrealists, all shown with eyes closed, are arranged around the reproduction of a nude painting by René Magritte. In so doing, a very masculinely connoted group activity is simulated in which sexual desire makes possible the liberation of thought. A violent variation – a blinding, likewise understood as liberation – appears in the famous eyeball-slicing scene in the prologue of the 1928 film Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
Flora, fauna, firmament
Frottage, Nature Printing, and Plant Photography
Plantlike animals, seashell flowers, fishbone forests, crocheted stars – the visual world of Max Ernst is full of fantastic forms. For him, nature served as both inspiration and material. In his frottages, he used wood, leaves and much more for rubbings on paper. This is how the portfolio Histoire naturelle (Natural History) was created in 1926. The frottages were reproduced as collotype prints, photomechanically produced prints using an exposed glass plate as a printing block.
With Histoire Naturelle, Max Ernst drew on natural history encyclopaedias, but reworked the originals to create his own natural history. In so doing he dissected nature, showed the tiny and the distant, and created planar structures rather than views. This interest in the formal language of nature also resonates in the photography of the New Objectivity from around the same time, which reveal the aesthetic power of natural forms. That also made them interesting to the Surrealist movement.
In his artist’s book Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy from 1964, Max Ernst devoted himself entirely to celestial phenomena. As in photograms, Ernst used objects here like spirals or gears as stencils to evoke comets and nebulas.
Between Positive and Negative
Photogram, Cliché Verre, and Other Darkroom Experiments
The play of positive and negative effects is a recurring theme in Max Ernst’s oeuvre. Early works created using fine lines incised on a black ground show motifs that appear fragile and vague. He also used photographic techniques for some of his works and transformed his frottages into negative forms in Man Ray’s studio. In 1931, for example, he created dark photograms as illustrations for René Crevel’s text Mr. Knife, Miss Fork.
Max Ernst’s use of manually produced prototypes relates to a technique borrowed from the early days of photography: cliché verre, or glass printing. In this hybrid process, an etching is created on a glass plate coated with paint or ink, which then serves as a negative for the print. The twentieth century witnessed a rediscovery of cliché verre and the further amalgamation of photographic and drawing processes. The growing interest in camera-less photography led to a wide range of experiments using light and unconventional materials in various avant-garde circles.
Invisible Cuts
(Photo-) Collages, Collage Novels, and Surrealist Photography
For Max Ernst, collage is the fundamental mode of artistic production. It encompasses a colorful variety of methods for combining materials of all kinds, initiating an open-ended artistic process. Max Ernst had already experimented with collages of printed photographs during his Dada years. The combination of the most diverse illustrations and their fusion into a new image by painting and drawing over them all took place within the working process.
For his wood engraving collages, Max Ernst made use of old-fashioned illustrations from popular scientific magazines of the nineteenth century. Many of these images were also based on photographs; at that time, however, photos could not yet be reproduced and thus had to be rendered as wood engravings. His three collage novels featured visions and hallucinations alongside blasphemy, the critique of bourgeois morals, and the glorification of free love and revolution.
Photographers of the Surrealist movement from Claude Cahun to Karel Teige, from Georges Hugnet to Emila Medková created with the help of camera and darkroom as well as scissors and glue, a rich and multifarious cosmos of idiosyncratic realities that radically transcended traditional aesthetics.
Max Ernst in Front of the Camera
From Studio Portrait to Photo Booth
Max Ernst is one of the most frequently photographed artists of the twentieth century. He posed for the cameras of important photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Arnold Newman, Lee Miller, Irving Penn, and Man Ray. Their portraits demonstrate just how individual the view of a person can be. A whole series of photographs shows the artist at work, with his art, or in the studio. Whether in focused concentration wearing his painter’s smock, in the midst of creative chaos, or in intimate relation to his sculptures – such photographs reinforce or even create the iconic conception of the artist.
Another group of images shows Max Ernst with female companions such as the artists Leonora Carrington or Dorothea Tanning, which convey the intensity of their relations. As a member of the Surrealists Max Ernst frequently appears in group portraits. These images bear witness to the various stations of the movement – its beginnings in Paris or exile in America – as well as to constellations of fashion and gender. Whether individually or in a group, pensive, playful, joyful or serious, the photographs tell of Max Ernst’s delight in self-representation and in theatrical play.
Text from the Museum für Fotografie
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Max Ernst, New York 1941 Silver gelatin paper, new print 25.1 x 20.1cm
Josef Breitenbach (German, 1896-1984) Max Ernst and the seahorse, New York 1942 Silver gelatin paper 24 x 19cm
Arnold Newman (American, 1918-2006) Max Ernst, New York 1942 Silver gelatin paper 24.2 x 18.6cm
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Max Ernst 1946 Gelatin silver print
A reproduction of this image on postcard for the Max Ernst retrospective: 30 Years of his Work – A Survey, Copley Galleries, Beverly Hills 1949 is included in the exhibition.
John Kasnetzis Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with the sculpture Capricorne, Arizona 1948 Silver gelatin print, later print 23.6 x 18.8cm
In the summer of 1947, Max Ernst, exuberant and inspired by the arrival of water piped to our house (up to then we had hauled it daily from a well 5 miles away), began playing with cement and scrap iron with assists from box tops, eggshells, car springs, milk cartons and other detritus, The result: Capricorn, a monumental sculpture of regal but benign deities that consecrated our “garden” and watched over its inhabitants. Years later, when we had gone, a sculptor friend made molds and sent them to their creator in Huismes, France where he reassembled his Capricorn for casting in bronze. The above photo is a one-shot, spur-of-the-moment caper made after taking a people-less documentary photo.
Dorothea Tanning from Birthday, Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986
Denise Colomb (French, 1902-2004) Max Ernst on the roof terrace on the Quai Saint-Michel in Paris 1953 Silver gelatin paper, later print 28 x 22cm
Fritz Kempe (German, 1909-1988) Max Ernst, Hamburg 1964 Silver gelatin print 12.8 x 17.7cm
Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Seen at the Neuilly fair 1971 Colour reproduction of a collage, sheet 3 from the portfolio: Commonplaces. Eleven Poems and Twelve Collages 49 x 34.5cm
Museum für Fotografie Jebensstraße 2, 10623 Berlin
Attributed to Levina Teerlinc (Flemish, 1510-1576) Portrait of a Lady holding a Monkey
1560s
Watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gold and silver Image: 46 × 46 mm Frame, circular: 62 × 62 mm
Victor Reynolds and Richard Chadwick
There have been some mixed reviews of this exhibition – “tremendous show… an archaeological dig into the nation’s cultural past” (Jonathan Jones in The Guardian); “niggardly photography section… Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show… For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions.” (Laura Cumming in The Guardian).
Indeed, Laura Cumming poses an interesting question: “Here is a dilemma straight away: which should take precedence, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or as instance, evidence, expression of social history? It is an extremely complex remit…”
Having not been to London to see the exhibition I can only make generalised comment, but in my opinion the presentation should be a combination of both – art and social history – recognising that one does not exist, emerge, without the other. Art does not live in a bubble isolated from society and society itself is influenced by new ideas, new concepts of art. It’s not the chicken and the egg, it’s the scramble to make sense of living in this world using art as an expression, a (real, surreal, revolutionary, dream, abstract etc…) vision of the world that surrounds us.
Just from compiling this posting I have been enlightened as to the lives of many artists that I had never heard of before. I have admired their work and learnt about their lives and the conditions under which they worked. The exhibition has brought into my consciousness (and the consciousness of others) artists that I would have never have known about. It tells their stories in however fragmented a way … but at least it tells them. And that is a very good thing.
My particular favourites in the posting are three portraits where the sitter stares directly at you: Joan Carlile’s perceptive Portrait of a Lady Wearing an Oyster Satin Dress (1650s, below) so captivating of gaze, so incisive in its simplicity; Maria Cosway’s beautifully rendered Self Portrait (Nd, below) such a luminous and engaging presence; and Gwen John’s powerful Self-Portrait (1902, below) vibrant of colour, full of self-assurance. Wonderful evocations of humanity.
Scottish artist Dame Ethel Walker observes,
“There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.”
And that is what his exhibition gives you the obligation to do: to educate yourself, to make yourself a little more informed, to use your brain, eyes, and heart …and make up your own mind about the merit of the work.
I for one are very grateful for that opportunity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I have added relevant text from the large print guide and other bibliographic information from accredited sources to illuminate the works presented.
Many thankx to the Tate for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at right, Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest 1897
Spanning 400 years, this exhibition follows women on their journeys to becoming professional artists. From Tudor times to the First World War, artists such as Mary Beale, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Butler and Laura Knight paved a new artistic path for generations of women. They challenged what it meant to be a working woman of the time by going against society’s expectations – having commercial careers as artists and taking part in public exhibitions.
Including over 150 works, the show dismantles stereotypes surrounding women artists in history, who were often thought of as amateurs. Determined to succeed and refusing to be boxed in, they daringly painted what were usually thought to be subjects for male artists: history pieces, battle scenes and the nude.
The exhibition sheds light on how these artists championed equal access to art training and academy membership, breaking boundaries and overcoming many obstacles to establish what it meant to be a woman in the art world.
Text from the Tate Britain website
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) c. 1638-1639 (below)
Gentileschi claimed that ‘all the … Princes’ displayed her self-portrait in their galleries. In addition to this work, Charles I owned another self-portrait, which is now lost. Here, Gentileschi uses her own image to portray the allegorical figure of Pittura (also the Italian feminine noun for painting), who she depicts in a working apron before an easel absorbed in the act of creation.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
As a self-portrait the painting is particularly sophisticated and accomplished. The position in which Artemisia has portrayed herself would have been extremely difficult for the artist to capture, yet the work is economically painted, with very few pentiments. In order to view her own image she may have arranged two mirrors on either side of herself, facing each other. Depicting herself in the act of painting in this challenging pose, the angle and position of her head would have been the hardest to accurately render, requiring skilful visualisation.
Installation view of the exhibition ‘Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’ at Tate Britain showing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders c. 1638-1640 (below)
Likely commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria, this work was displayed in her Withdrawing Chamber in Whitehall Palace. The subject is an Old Testament narrative on virtue and faith. Susanna, bathing in privacy, is spied on by two elders who attempt to sexually assault her. When she resists them, the men accuse her of adultery. Susanna is arrested and about to be put to death until the men are questioned, and her innocence is revealed. Here, Gentileschi depicts Susanna as vulnerable and fearful, shielding her nakedness. She returned to the subject throughout her career.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
This spring, Tate Britain will present Now You See Us:Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920. This ambitious group show will chart women’s road to being recognised as professional artists, a 400-year journey which paved the way for future generations and established what it meant to be a woman in the British art world. The exhibition covers the period in which women were visibly working as professional artists, but went against societal expectations to do so.
Featuring over 100 artists, the exhibition will celebrate well-known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Julia Margaret Cameron and Gwen John, alongside many others who are only now being rediscovered. Their careers were as varied as the works they produced: some prevailed over genres deemed suitable for women like watercolour landscapes and domestic scenes. Others dared to take on subjects dominated by men like battle scenes and the nude, or campaigned for equal access to training and membership of professional institutions. Tate Britain will showcase over 200 works, including oil painting, watercolour, pastel, sculpture, photography and ‘needlepainting’ to tell the story of these trailblazing artists.
Now You See Us will begin at the Tudor court with Levina Teerlinc, many of whose miniatures will be brought together for the first time in four decades, and Esther Inglis, whose manuscripts contain Britain’s earliest known self-portraits by a woman artist. The exhibition will then look to the 17th century. Focus will be given to one of art history’s most celebrated women artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, who created major works in London at the court of Charles I, including the recently rediscovered Susanna and the Elders 1638-40, on loan from the Royal Collection for the very first time. The exhibition will also look to women such as Mary Beale, Joan Carlile and Maria Verelst who broke new ground as professional portrait painters in oil.
In the 18th century, women artists took part in Britain’s first public art exhibitions, including overlooked figures such as Katherine Read and Mary Black; the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer; and Margaret Sarah Carpenter, a leading figure in her day but little heard of now. The show will look at Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, the only women included among the Founder Members of the Royal Academy of Arts; it took 160 years for membership to be granted to another woman. Women artists of this era are often dismissed as amateurs pursuing ‘feminine’ occupations like watercolour and flower painting, but many worked in these genres professionally: needlewoman Mary Linwood, whose gallery was a major tourist attraction; miniaturist Sarah Biffin, who painted with her mouth, having been born without arms and legs; and Augusta Withers, a botanical illustrator employed by the Horticultural Society.
The Victorian period saw a vast expansion in public exhibition venues. Now You See Us will showcase major works by critically appraised artists of this period, including Elizabeth Butler (née Thompson)‘s monumental The Roll Call 1874 (Butler’s work prompted critic John Ruskin to retract his statement that “no women could paint”), and nudes by Henrietta Rae and Annie Swynnerton, which sparked both debate and celebration. The exhibition will also look at women’s connection to activism, including Florence Claxton‘s satirical ‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley 1861 which will be on public display for the first time since it was painted; and an exploration of the life of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, an early member of the Society of Female Artists who is credited with the campaign for women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. On show will be the student work of women finally admitted to art schools, as well as their petitions for equal access to life drawing classes.
The exhibition will end in the early 20th century with women’s suffrage and the First World War. Women artists like Gwen John,Vanessa Bell and Helen Saunders played an important role in the emergence of modernism, abstraction and vorticism, but others, such as Anna Airy, who also worked as a war artist, continued to excel in conventional traditions. The final artists in the show, Laura Knight and Ethel Walker, offer powerful examples of ambitious, independent, confident professionals who achieved critical acclaim and – finally – membership of the Royal Academy.
Press release from Tate Britain
Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679) The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park
1650s
Oil on canvas
Lamport Hall
CC BY-NC-ND
Joan Carlile (English, 1600-1679) Portrait of a Lady Wearing an Oyster Satin Dress
1650s
Oil on canvas
30.8 x 25.5cm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Government Art Collection
Purchased from Philip Mould Ltd, 2018
Joan Carlile or Carlell or Carliell (c. 1606-1679), was an English portrait painter. She was one of the first British women known to practise painting professionally. Before Carlile, known professional female painters working in Britain were born elsewhere in Europe, principally the Low Countries.
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Joan Carlile’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady known as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale 1650s (below); and at right, Portrait of an Unknown Lady 1650-1655 (below)
Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679) Portrait of an Unknown Lady (installation view)
1650-1655
Oil on canvas Support: 1107 × 900 mm Frame: 1205 × 1012 × 73 mm Photo: Tate
Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679) Portrait of an Unknown Lady known as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale
1650s
Oil on canvas
The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart
Here, Carlile uses the same white satin dress seen in a nearby painting. The pose, with the sitter elegantly gathering a handful of fabric, is taken from works by Charles I’s portrait painter, Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The sitter is sometimes identified as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale. She was Carlile’s near neighbour in Petersham, at Ham House. The broken columns in the background are often used to symbolise loss.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679) Portrait of an Unknown Lady
1650-1655
Oil on canvas Support: 1107 × 900 mm Frame: 1205 × 1012 × 73 mm Photo: Tate
Portraits by Joan Carlile are rare and this is one of only approximately ten that can be identified. Of these, two are in public collections (Ham House, Surrey, and National Portrait Gallery, London), while others are held in historic house collections and family trusts in the United Kingdom, for example Lamport Hall, Burghley House and Berkeley Castle. Carlile seems to have specialised in small-scale full length portraits of figures, usually female, set in large landscape or garden settings. The composition employed here, in which the figure holds the skirt of her dress with one hand and shawl with another, was most likely a template arrangement. It appears in two other portraits, one showing the figure facing the same way as here, the other in reverse, but with both figures wearing the same white satin dress. This repeated composition adds weight to the proposition that Carlile was a professional artist. The wife of Lodowick Carlile (or Carlell), a minor poet and dramatist who also held the office of Gentleman of the Bows to Charles I, Joan Carlile lived with her husband in Petersham, a suburb of London. However, in 1653 their neighbour, Brian Duppa, recorded that ‘the Mistress of the Family intends for London, where she meanes to make use of her skill to som more Advantage then hitherto she hath don’ (quoted in Toynbee and Isham 1954, p.275). In 1654 Carlile is recorded as living in London’s Covent Garden, then the heart of the artistic community (see Burnett 2004/2010, accessed 2 October 2015).
Joan Carlile challenged societal expectations by becoming one of Britain’s first professional women artists in the 1600s, earning her living as an oil painter. Initially employed in King Charles I’s household, Carlile liked to paint in her spare time. With the outbreak of the Civil War, she began painting to support herself.
Carlile moved to Covent Garden in the 1650s – then the centre of the art world – and set up a successful commercial portrait business. Her template of carefully posed figures in silk gowns against landscape backgrounds, seen here in Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1650-5), proved extremely popular. Admired as a professional artist in her lifetime, only a small number of her portraits still exist, some which have never been seen in public.
In her Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1650-1655) the astonishing nacreous lustre of the sitter’s white silk gown, shown full length, shines against the foil of the dull brown foliage behind her. At this point, the Civil War had ended but the restoration of the monarchy was still in the future, and Carlile’s painting, with its overt celebration of luxury and leisure (the spotless pale fabric speaks of both) seems provocative.
It is possible that Carlile taught Anne Killigrew (1660-1685), an accomplished painter and poet whose family encouraged her creative pursuits, although it’s not clear if she ever painted professionally. Only a handful of Killigrew’s works survive today, including Venus Attired by the Three Graces, which reveals her interest in mythological scenes.
Although she died of smallpox aged just 25, Killigrew stands alongside Beale and Carlile as one of Britain’s first female artists.
Anne Killigrew (English, 1660-1685) Venus Attired by the Three Graces
c. 1680
Oil on canvas Support: 1120 × 950 mm Frame: 1282 × 1102 × 63 mm
Falmouth Art Gallery
Purchased with the assistance of the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, the Beecroft Bequest, Falmouth Decorative and Fine Arts Society, the Estate of Barry Hughes in memory of Grace and Thomas Hughes and generous donations from local supporters
Public domain
Anne Killigrew has been described as the most celebrated female English prodigy of the Seventeeth Century. A poet and artist of great beauty and repute, Killigrew died of smallpox at the age of just 25. Anne’s exceptional qualities as an artist and a poet were highly praised in her short lifetime. The poet John Dryden dedicated a poem to her in which he refers directly to this picture: ‘Where nymphs of brightest form appear, and shaggy satyrs standing near’ (from ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew Excellent In The Two Sister-Arts of Poesy And Painting: An Ode’). Anne Killigrew worked at the Royal Court of King James II as Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. Anne’s grandfather, Sir William Killigrew, was the Governor of Pendennis Castle, and his son, Dr Henry Killigrew moved to London to work as chaplain to King Charles I. He later became master of the Savoy Hospital.
Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699) Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, Facing Left
c. 1660
Oil on paper Support: 325 × 245 mm Frame: 421 × 340 × 32 mm
Tate
Purchased 2010 Photo: Tate
In the late 1650s and early 1660s Beale and her family were living on Hind Court, off Fleet Street in London. She painted privately and had a painting room in her home. Her husband had a civil service position as Deputy Clerk of the Patents. Portrait sittings of family and friends were often social occasions, with conversation and dinner afterwards. It is in this period that Beale produced small oil sketches on paper of family members, particularly her two young sons. Whether they relate to larger oil on canvas portraits is unclear.
This oil sketch of a young boy, shown in three-quarter profile, is of Mary Beale’s eldest son Bartholomew, baptised in 1656. His appearance, both in age and costume, is very similar to that in Mary Beale’s Self-portrait with her family (Geffrye Museum, London), painted c. 1659-60, before the birth of her youngest son Charles. It relates closely to another sketch of Bartholomew in oil on paper painted at the same time, Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, in Profile c. 1660 (Tate T13245). Whether these sketches are connected to the production of the Geffrye Museum portrait, or were simply executed at around the same time, is not known. They are painted in oil on paper, which seems to have been a feature of Beale’s working method in the early 1660s but is not known in her later career, when she made preparatory sketches in chalk on paper or in oil on canvas (see, for example, Portrait of a Young Girl c. 1679-81, Tate T06612). When this sketch was made, the Beale family was living in Hind Court, off Fleet Street in London, where Mary Beale’s husband, Charles, was employed as Deputy Clerk of the Patents Office. It is difficult to determine whether Beale had much of a commercial portrait practice at this date, but documents certainly record the production of portraits of family and friends. In her ‘painting room’, Beale had ‘pencills [sic.], brushes, goose & swan fitches’, as well as ‘quantities of primed paper to paint on’ (George Vertue, transcription of Charles Beale’s 1661 notebook, now lost, quoted in Barber 1999, p. 16).
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Mary Beale’s Anne Sotheby 1676-1677
Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699) Anne Sotheby
1676-1677
Oil on canvas
Tate
Purchased with funds provided by the Nicholas Themans Trust 2024
Beale’s husband kept a daily record of her activities in the studio. Two of his over 30 notebooks and a few partial transcripts are still known. They record Beale’s sitters, her painting stages, her painting materials and her prices. For her commissioned works, she borrowed poses from the portraits of the court artist Peter Lely (1618-1680). Anne Sotheby’s pose is taken from his portrait of Lady Essex Finch. Beale charged £10 for paintings of this size. Her sons acted as studio assistants; her youngest, Charles, was paid to paint the drapery in this portrait.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Mary Beale (née Cradock) (1633-1699) was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents a scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed “in her painting of Apricots”, though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a “virtuous” practitioner in “Oyl Colours” by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale’s work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of “An Essay towards an English-School”, his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.
Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699) Mary Beale
c. 1666
Oil on canvas
109.2 x 87.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Purchased, 1912
CC BY-NC-ND
Beale is shown holding an unframed canvas on which are sketch portraits of her two sons, Bartholomew (1656-1709) and Charles (1660-1714?)
Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699) Self Portrait
c. 1675
Oil on sacking
89 x 73cm
West Suffolk Heritage Service
Purchased
CC BY-NC-ND
The early English portrait painter Mary Beale (1622/1623-1699) had a father who was an amateur artist, miniature painter and a collector of paintings (her family owned work by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck) and her husband, Charles, was also an amateur painter and ran her studio in London’s fashionable Pall Mall.
Unusually, in her case, her talent was matched by her spouse’s high regard of it, and she was allowed to supersede him and establish a professional career. She took on female apprentices, though no records of their subsequent careers survive.
Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 celebrates over 100 women who forged public careers as artists. The exhibition begins with the earliest recorded women artists working in Britain. It ends with women’s place in society fundamentally changed by the First World War and the first women gaining the right to vote. Across these 400 years, women were a constant presence in the art world. Now You See Us explores these artists’ careers and asks why so many have been erased from mainstream art histories.
Organised chronologically, the exhibition follows women who practised art as a livelihood rather than an accomplishment. The chosen works were often exhibited at public exhibitions, where these artists sold their art and made their reputations. Most of the women featured belonged to a social class that gave them the time and opportunity to develop their talents. Many were the daughters, sisters or wives of artists. Yet even these women were regarded differently. Now You See Us charts their fight to be accepted as professional artists on equal terms with men.
Many of the exhibited works reflect prejudiced notions of the most appropriate art forms and subjects for women. Others challenge the commonly held belief that women were best suited to ‘imitation’, proving they have always been capable of creative invention. From painting epic battle scenes to campaigning for access to art academies, these women defied society’s limited expectations of them and forged their own paths. Yet so many of their careers have been forgotten and artworks lost. Drawing on the artists’ own writings, art criticism, and new and established research, this exhibition attempts to restore these women to their rightful place in art history. Now You See Us aims to ensure these artists are not only seen but remembered.
Women at the Tudor Courts
There are significant gaps in our knowledge of women’s artistic lives in the sixteenth century. As is the case for many artists in this exhibition, their lives are poorly documented and often hidden behind those of their husbands and fathers. The problems this presents are evident in this room.
Susanna Horenbout (1503-1554) and Levina Teerlinc (c. 1510s-1576) are among the earliest women in Britain to be named as artists. Their reputations are clearly recorded. In 1521, Horenbout’s skill was admired by the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and in 1567, both artists were praised by the Italian historian Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589). Yet no works by Horenbout have been identified, and those attributed to Teerlinc are not certain.
Horenbout and Teerlinc were both daughters of Flemish manuscript illuminators and were likely trained in their family workshops. Both arrived in England to work at the court of Henry VIII. But as women, they were not employed as artists. While Horenbout’s brother Lucas Horenbout (1490-1544) was Henry VIII’s painter, she served Anne of Cleves as one of her Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber. Teerlinc served Elizabeth I likewise. This does not mean that they did not paint – at court, their artistic talents would have been a distinguishing skill – but, as is a common feature of this exhibition, written histories have failed to record their activities.
Working in a different context – as a scribe and calligrapher – the works of Esther Inglis (1571-1624) can be identified. Inglis authored more than 60 manuscript books and included her name and self-portrait in many. Raised in Scotland, she may have learnt the art of calligraphy from her mother, Marie Presot (active 1569-1574).
Artemisia Gentileschi
Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi arrived in London in c. 1638-9 by invitation of Charles I. Like other European rulers, Charles I employed artists of international reputation to signal the cultural sophistication of his court. Gentileschi had prestigious patrons across Europe, including the Grand Duke of Tuscany and Philip IV of Spain. She was the first woman to be a member of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence, and in Rome, her house had been ‘full of cardinals and princes’. Gentileschi’s fame as an artist was augmented by her status as a woman.
In London, Gentileschi worked for Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. Records suggest she produced seven works for the royal collection. These included self-portraits and large history paintings, with subject matter drawn from classical history, mythology, and the Bible. Only the two displayed here are still known. Gentileschi often placed women at the centre of her works, depicting narratives that celebrate their strength and virtue. Susanna and the Elders is an example of the kind of work for which Gentileschi was celebrated.
Gentileschi achieved in her lifetime what many women who came after her had to fight to attain: she was a professional artist who ran her own studio, was a member of an art academy, worked from life models and was ranked as a serious artist alongside men. Despite this, Gentileschi’s status has fluctuated over time, and the artist has faded in and out of art history.
Early accounts of Gentileschi’s work focus on her personal life as much as her painting. Like many of the women artists who came after her, the details of her biography continue to dictate interpretations of her work.
The First Professionals
In 1658, historian William Sanderson (c. 1586-1676) published Graphice. The use of the pen and pensil. Or, The most excellent art of painting. The publication lists contemporary artists practising in England. He includes four women working in oil paint: ‘Mrs Carlile’ (Joan Carlile), ‘Mrs Beale’ (Mary Beale), ‘Mrs Brooman’ (probably Sarah Broman) and ‘Mrs Weimes’ (Anne Wemyss). Carlile and Beale are believed to be two of the earliest British women to have worked as professional artists. Very little is known about Broman or Wemyss beyond snatches of information in archives.
This short list highlights how unusual it was for British women to pursue art as a profession in the seventeenth century. Women had little agency over their own lives and were subject first to their fathers and then their husbands. Limited to the domestic sphere, they were not expected to conduct public lives. Many women painted privately with no thought of turning it into a career. While young men began as apprentices or assistants in the studios of professionals, this route was not open to most women.
In the seventeenth century women writers, poets, playwrights and artists began to give voice to those questioning their secondary status and petitioning for women’s rights. They argued that it was lack of education, not ‘weak minds’ that limited their opportunities. This fight for equality and access to education runs throughout the exhibition.
The First Exhibitors
The first public art exhibition in Britain took place in London in 1760, and art shows soon became an important part of the city’s social calendar. Founded in 1768, the Royal Academy quickly emerged as a driving force in cultural life, with its Summer Exhibition attracting tens of thousands of visitors every year. Other venues, including the Society of Artists and the British Institution also hosted exhibitions.
Women artists played an active part in this competitive world. An estimated 900 women exhibited their work between 1760 and 1830. Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were both founding members of the Royal Academy (although, as women, they weren’t awarded full membership and were excluded from the Academy’s council meetings and governance). Despite this precedent, it would take more than 150 years for the next woman to be elected to membership.
Kauffman is one of the few women artists of the eighteenth century whose profile has been sustained. Many others made names for themselves, but their careers are not well documented. Even Moser is less well known, perhaps because she painted flowers while Kauffman pursued the ‘high genre’ of history painting, depicting historical, mythological and biblical narratives.
Art critics of the time often criticised women for their ‘weak’ figurative work, yet they were denied access to life-drawing classes. Women artists also had to battle social expectations. Publishing a private or studio address in an exhibition catalogue was a signal of commercial practice, but painting for money was considered improper. Women artists of higher social rank were listed as ‘honorary’ exhibitors; some exhibited simply as ‘a Lady’, and after marriage, many switched their status from ‘commercial’ to ‘amateur’.
‘Just What Ladies Do For Amusement’
In 1770, the Royal Academy banned ‘Needle-work, artificial Flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles’ from its exhibitions. They also banned works that were copies. Other categories of art that the Academy considered ‘lower’, such as miniature painting, pastel and watercolour were also treated dismissively. Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the Academy’s President, said that working in pastel was unworthy of real artists and was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement’.
These ‘lower arts’ were ones that women practised the most. Small in scale and considered less technically challenging than oil painting, they demanded less equipment and could be pursued at home. They were taught to middle and upper-class girls and were the realm of women who pursued art as amateur accomplishment.
Despite this, these art forms offered opportunities for women to earn a living. Many turned miniature painting, needlework and pastel into lucrative professional careers, supplementing their income through tutoring. Their patrons were often women, and some boasted large, fashionable clienteles and even galleries which became tourist attractions.
Founded in 1754, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (the Society of Arts) offered cash prizes and medals in many categories, including the ‘polite arts’. Awards were given for patterns for embroidery, copies of prints, drawings of statues and of ‘beasts, birds, fruit or flowers’, as well as landscapes. Some prizes were specifically intended for young women. The Society was a stepping stone to a career and many of the artists in this exhibition won medals. Yet most of the women recorded as submitting work for competition can no longer be identified beyond their names.
Flowers
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, painting flowers was considered a suitably delicate pursuit for women. Imitating nature (rather than demonstrating creative or imaginative flair) was thought to be an appropriate outlet for women’s artistic skills. Flowers were also at the heart of respectable hobbies like embroidery, botany and gardening. In the 1850s, the women’s periodical the Ladies’ Treasury called flower painting ‘a ladylike and truly feminine accomplishment’. When Mary Moser exhibited Cymon and Iphigenia (based on a poem by John Dryden, 1631-1700) at the Royal Academy in 1789, a reviewer urged her to stick to flowers. She painted flowers ‘transcendently’, he noted, and should do ‘nothing else’.
Many women were employed as professional illustrators, recording plant species for horticulturists and botanical publishers. Some conducted hybrid careers, working as illustrators and drawing tutors while exhibiting flower paintings for a wider market. In the Victorian era, critics applauded several women artists as leaders of the genre. Yet the idea that flower painting, especially in watercolour, was an exclusively amateur pastime has damaged the legacies of many accomplished artists who successfully worked within this genre.
Victorian Spectacle
Grand exhibitions were a defining part of the Victorian art world. The Royal Academy, the leading art institution since 1768, was still Britain’s most prestigious exhibition venue, but was later criticised for its traditional conservatism. New venues, such as London’s Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in 1877, became rival spaces, and exhibitions in Liverpool and Manchester offered fresh opportunities for exhibiting artists. The Victorian era was also the age of World Fairs. Major exhibitions were held in London and Paris, and in 1893, the World’s Exposition in Chicago was visited by over 25 million people.
This room explores the successes of women artists on this public stage. Many of the works on display were shown in these exhibitions. They won international medals, praise from art critics and public recognition. Yet women tackling ‘male’ subjects, such as battle scenes, caused surprise. Opinion was also divided on women painting the nude: some thought it immoral, others brave.
Exhibitions gave women a public platform to build substantial reputations, and some became popular names. Despite this, membership of the Royal Academy, which was a mark of professional recognition, remained out of reach. As a result, women had no automatic exhibiting rights and were reliant on committees of men selecting their works for exhibition. Without institutional support, they had to navigate the commercial art market on their own.
Women artists’ campaigns for access to the Academy joined calls for greater equality in society. From the 1850s, women petitioned for equal rights to education and work, as well as women’s suffrage. These causes are reflected in the works in this room.
Watercolour
Watercolour was considered one of the ‘polite arts’ best suited to women. However, there were few opportunities to practice professionally. The principal watercolour societies – the Old (founded in 1804) and the rival New (founded in 1807 and reconstituted in 1831) – restricted the membership of women. Membership of the Old was limited to six women (in practice, usually four), while the New admitted around ten.
In both societies, women were confined to the category of ‘Lady Members’ until the end of the nineteenth century. They had no say in governance and were denied access to the financial premiums awarded to full members. Since the annual exhibitions of both societies were closed to non-members, most women had limited opportunities to exhibit their work.
Against these odds, many women water colourists achieved significant commercial and critical success. They enjoyed solo shows and developed commercial relationships with dealers, taking control of their careers.
In 1857, a group of women founded the Society of Female Artists (later, the Society of Lady Artists in c. 1869, then the Society of Women Artists in 1899) to promote the work of women artists in Britain.
Photography
The announcement of photography in 1839 marked a major shift in the art world. In its first decades, photography was a laborious practice that required an understanding of chemistry and optics, as well as expensive equipment. It needed more money, specialist instruction and time than most other art forms. For women who had access to these privileges, the medium provided new opportunities.
From its foundation in 1853, the Photographic Society of London welcomed women members. However, they rarely attended meetings, which were scheduled in the evenings when women required a chaperone to leave the house. The atmosphere of the meetings was described as a ‘men’s club’ and it wasn’t until 1898 that the Society belatedly banned smoking ‘in respect of ladies’ attendance’. Meetings often included papers on new techniques and equipment, providing significant benefits to those who were able to join.
Women participated in London’s first public photographic exhibitions at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852-3 and at the Photographic Society in 1854. The Amateur Photographic Association, established in 1861, also welcomed women from its outset. In the 1890s and early 1900s, London’s Photographic Salon became a key venue. Founded by the Linked Ring Brotherhood, who promoted photography as a fine art, Salon exhibitors included women from across Europe and the US. A photograph of British photographer Carine Cadby in silhouette, examining one of her glass plate negatives, featured on the cover of the 1896 Salon catalogue. Despite this, women were not elected as members of the Linked Ring until 1900. By 1909, they numbered just 8 among 63 men.
Art School
Women were excluded from enrolment at the Royal Academy Schools, Britain’s principal art academy, until 1860. Laura Herford (1831-1870) was the first woman admitted. She had submitted her work for consideration using only her initials and was assumed to be a man. Once women gained entry, they were determined to achieve equal access to training.
Women were barred from the Academy’s life-drawing classes until 1893. Their exclusion from this vital component of art education was justified on many grounds. Chiefly, it was to ‘protect’ women’s supposed modesty, but also because they were considered amateurs who lacked the intellectual capacity to practice art at the highest level. Women students marshalled critical support for their cause and submitted petitions. Life drawing was considered essential to the training of men pursuing careers as artists. Why, they argued, was it not also essential for women?
The Female School of Art, founded in 1842, provided another route into art education. Like several regional schools, such as that in Manchester, it encouraged women into vocational careers in design. Women also had access to private academies, including Sass’s and Leigh’s (later Heatherleys) in London, which prepared students for admission to the Royal Academy Schools. And some women artists, such as Louise Jopling, established their own art school.
In 1871, the founding of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London signalled a fundamental change of attitudes. From the outset, the Slade offered women an education on equal terms with men. Studying from life models was a central focus of teaching and by the turn of the century, women students outnumbered men by three to one. Access to life drawing had been regarded as the last barrier to equal opportunity. Now they could study from life, some critics argued it was up to women to prove they could be successful artists.
Being Modern
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw rapid change for women, with their rights, roles and opportunities evolving at an unprecedented pace. The First World War signalled a decisive change for women’s place in society and in 1918, after decades of campaigning, some women finally gained the right to vote.
At the same time, the art world was also changing. New art groups and exhibiting societies rejected tradition and promoted modernist aesthetics. Instead of figurative realism, they privileged form, colour and experimentation. Many saw modernism as an opportunity for greater artistic freedom. However, despite growing liberalism in art and society, women artists still faced challenges. The New English Art Club became a rival exhibiting venue to the Royal Academy but was slow to admit women. The Camden Town Group labelled itself ‘progressive’ but openly excluded women.
While modernism is often presented as the dominant movement of the early twentieth century, it doesn’t account for all artistic production of the period. Membership of the Royal Academy, an exhibiting venue many now regarded as too traditional, remained a symbolic goal for many women. When Annie Swynnerton was elected an Associate Member in 1922, Laura Knight said she had broken down the ‘barriers of prejudice’. In 1936, Knight was elected a Royal Academician, becoming the first woman to achieve full membership since the eighteenth century.
The artworks in the final room of the exhibition explore this complex period. Their variety reveals women forging their own paths and pursuing professional careers with purpose and confidence. While many chose not to challenge traditional artistic values, they pushed the boundaries of what was expected of them, paving the way for generations of women artists who came after them.
Text from the Tate exhibition guide
Mary Delany (English, 1700-1788) Rubus Odoratus
1772-1782
The British Museum
Bequeathed by Augusta Hall, Baroness Llanover in 1897
Delany was not a professional artist. However, she pursued art with a seriousness of purpose, working in a range of artistic and decorative mediums. She was in her early seventies when she turned to botanical collage, which stemmed from the Dutch art known as knipkunst or schaarkunst. Over the course of a decade, Delany created nearly one thousand botanically accurate collages of plants made from intricately cut pieces of coloured paper. In this collage, Delany shows a flowering raspberry, which was introduced to Britain from North America in 1770.
Mary Morris Knowles, born of a Quaker family in Rugeley, Staffordshire, was celebrated as much for her intellect, religious conviction and unusual powers of conversation as for her skill with the needle. A friend of the poetess Anna Seward (‘The Swan of Lichfield’) and of Dr Johnson, she is now regarded as an important early protagonist of the feminist viewpoint in English cultural life. Her support for the abolition of slavery, her investigation into mystical science and her knowledge of garden design, in addition to her accomplishment as a needlewoman, suggest the breadth of her interests. In 1771 she was introduced by her fellow Quaker Benjamin West to Queen Charlotte, who remained on terms of friendship with her over the next thirty years and whose interest in female accomplishments, notably needlework, was well known. Mrs Knowles’s visits to Buckingham House included an occasion in 1778 on which she presented her 5-year-old son George to the King and Queen.
Following the first visit in 1771, the Queen commissioned Mrs Knowles to make a copy of Zoffany’s portrait of George III in needlework or ‘needle painting’ as it was also known. This technique ‘so highly finished, that it has all the softness and Effect of painting’ was achieved with a combination of irregular satin-stitch and long-and-short stitch, worked on hand-woven tammy in an arbitrary pattern and at speed, using fine wool dyed in a wide range of colours under her own supervision. Eight years later Mrs Knowles embroidered the self portrait showing her at work on the Zoffany which, like the earlier piece, she signed with initials and dated. This appears always to have been in the Royal Collection and was presumably also commissioned by Queen Charlotte.
Mary Black (English, c. 1737-1814) Messenger Monsey (1693-1788)
1764
Oil on canvas
127 x 101.6cm
Gift from Frederick Walford, 1877
Royal College of Physicians, London
CC BY-NC-ND
This portrait of the physician Messenger Monsey (1694-1788) is Black’s only known oil painting. Black likely hoped it was a step towards establishing herself as a professional artist, but the issue of payment caused friction. Black hope to charge her client £25, half the amount charged by leading portraitist Joshua Reynolds, but after Monsey’s complaint offered to drop it to a quarter. Monsey considered Black’s expectation of a fee improper. He claimed it would damage her reputation if word got out, and even referred to her as a ‘slut’ in a letter to his cousin.
Wall text from the exhibition
Little is known of the father-and-daughter artists Thomas and Mary Black. Thomas was mainly employed painting draperies for more successful painters, and Mary usually painted copies of old masters. In a letter from Monsey to Mary Black, the doctor wrote: ‘I was bedevilled to let you make your first attempt upon my gracefull person… drawn like a Hog in armour’.
Black was clearly unfazed by awkward sitters. She built a flourishing artistic practice, painting and teaching the aristocracy, earning enough to live independently (she never married) and keep servants and a horse and carriage at her London home. She died there in old age just as the nineteenth century began.
Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819) Standing Female Nude
Nd
Black and white chalk on grey-green paper
49 x W 30.2cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
As women were excluded from life drawing classes, many took their own steps to improve their anatomical knowledge. They sketched from casts and statues and copied from other artists’ drawings and anatomy books. These rare works show that some artists found ways around these restrictions, although little is known about how Moser and Stone accessed life models.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819) Flowers in a vase, which stands on a ledge
1765
Watercolour and bodycolour on paper
The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
From the same series as the work nearby, this watercolour represents Sagittarius. The vase is filled with a cascade of late flowering plants: asters, chrysanthemums and rare pale nerines, captured in the cold light of winter. In addition to her professional profile as a Royal Academician, Moser acted as a royal tutor. She was part of Queen Charlotte’s circle and taught the princesses botany, embroidery and flower painting. She worked alongside other artists, including Meen and Delany, whose work is also displayed in this room.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Admired for her striking paintings of flowers, Mary Moser was recognised for her talent from a very young age. She trained with her father, an acclaimed artist and goldsmith, winning her first medal for flower drawing at 14. At just 24, she became one of only two female founders of the Royal Academy, alongside Angelica Kauffman.
Moser painted portraits and historical scenes, but her skilled floral still life works, like Flowers in a vase, which stands on a ledge (1765), were praised by critics. Though still life was traditionally seen as a ‘lesser subject’, her floral works were so widely appreciated she received royal commissions, including one from Queen Charlotte. Despite recognition and the exhibition of many paintings, few of Moser’s works survive today.
Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819) Vase of Flowers
Between 1758 and 1819
Oil on canvas
72.1 x W 53.6cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Gift from Major the Hon. Henry Rogers Broughton, 1966
The exquisite attention to detail in her painting, with its beads of dew and butterflies on the wing, was perhaps nurtured by seeing her father’s work; as a goldsmith and medallion maker, this was also his talent. But the gorgeous sensuality – seen also in her approach to the nude figure – was entirely her own. She married, aged 53, but also had an affair with the estranged husband of another artist: Maria Hadfield Cosway (1759-1839).
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Angelica Kauffman’s Colouring 1778-1780 (below)
This painting is part of a set of the four [titled ‘Elements of Art’] commissioned from Kauffman by the Royal Academy to decorate the ceiling of the Royal Academy’s new Council Room in Somerset House which opened in 1780. …
Kauffman represented each of her four Elements of Art as women. Female personifications of abstract concepts and values were commonplace in European art but depicting all four as women was unusual. Design (or Disegno), in particular, was known as ‘the father of all the arts’ and was traditionally depicted as a man, often in contrast to Colour or Painting personified as a woman (see Baumgartel). In Design and Colouring, the women are physically engaged in the act of creating whereas in Composition and Invention they are shown in contemplation. In Invention the figure looks to the sky for inspiration and in Composition she is deep in thought with her head resting on her hand in the traditional gesture of melancholy or reverie.
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at centre, Maria Cosway’s Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ 1781-1782 (below); and at right, Cosway’s A Persian Lady Worshipping the Rising Sun 1784 (below)
Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838) Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’
1781-1782
Oil on canvas
Chatsworth House
Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images
Public domain
Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838) A Persian Lady Worshipping the Rising Sun
1784
Oil on canvas
61 x 73.7cm
Sir John Soane’s Museum
Gift from the artist, 1822
By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
CC BY-NC-ND
As well as portraits, Cosway exhibited history paintings. This work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1784. Although only a few of Cosway’s history pictures can be located now, paintings such as this one were well known through reproductions made by leading engravers and print publishers. Cosway’s success was hindered by her husband, who did not like her to paint professionally. She reflected later that had he permitted it, she would have ‘made a better painter, but left to myself by degrees, instead of improving, I lost what I brought from Italy of my early studies.’
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838) Bouquet of Flowers
1780
Watercolour on paper
The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Bequeathed by Sir Robert Clermont Witt, 1952
CC BY-NC-ND
Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838) The Judgement of Korah, Dathan and Abiram
c. 1801
Pen, ink and oil on canvas
37.5 x 29.2cm
Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection
CC BY-NC-ND
Maria Cosway (1759-1838) (after) Self Portrait
Nd
Oil on canvas
61 x W 50.8cm
Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries
Bequeathed by Sam Wilson, 1925
CC BY-NC-ND
Sarah Biffin (English, 1784-1850) Self-portrait
c. 1821
Watercolour and bodycolour on ivory
Private collection
Biffin, whose baptism record notes that she was born ‘without arms or legs’, taught herself to sew, write and paint using her mouth and shoulder. She wrote that, as a child, ‘I was continually practising every invention; till at length I could, with my mouth – thread a needle – tie a knot – do fancy work – cut out and make my own dresses’.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Clara Maria Pope’s Peony 1822 (below); and at right, Pope’s Peony 1821 (below)
Clara Maria Pope (British, 1767-1831) Peony
1822
Bodycolour on card
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Courtesy the Natural History Museum
Clara Maria Pope (British, 1767-1831) Peony
1821
Bodycolour on card
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Courtesy the Natural History Museum
Pope appears in museum records under many names: Clara Leigh, Clara Wheatley (her first husband was the artist Francis Wheatley, 1747-1801), Clara Maria Pope (she married actor Alexander Pope in 1807) and Mrs Alexander Pope. Her changes of name have obscured her career as an artist. She exhibited watercolour landscapes and portraits, miniatures and genre works, but above all, Pope was an artist of flowers. She worked for the leading botanical publisher Samuel Curtis (1779-1860). The scientifically accurate peonies depicted here are 2 of 11 designs. They may have been intended as plates for a work that was never published.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Augusta Innes Withers (English, 1792-1877) The Canon Hall Muscat Grape
c. 1825
Watercolour on paper
444 × 352 mm
RHS Lindley Collections
Courtesy the Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library
Withers was employed by the Horticultural Society to make official ‘portraits’ of varieties of fruit growing in their orchards. The quality of Withers’s work meant her high fees were not questioned. Here, she paints sunlight glowing through grapes and the translucency of the skin of gooseberries in great detail. Withers drew and handcoloured engraved illustrations in the Horticultural Society’s Transactions and made illustrations of fruit for John Lindley’s Pomological Magazine in 1828 (Lindley was Secretary of the Society). Withers was also regarded as one of the best teachers of botanical illustration.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Rebecca Solomon’s Sherry, Sir?
c. 1858-1862 (below); and at right, Solomon’s A Young Teacher 1861 (below)
Rebecca Solomon (English, 1832-1886) Sherry, Sir?
c. 1858-1862
Oil on canvas
Private collection
Solomon often painted scenes of domestic life and interiors, which were considered more suitable subjects for women artists than history painting. Solomon’s domestic scenes include subtle commentary on social hierarchies. Sherry, Sir? depicts a maid with a silver tray. It reprises a well-known painting of the same title, painted by William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in 1851, but unlike Frith’s painting, Solomon draws attention to domestic labour and the hierarchies of a middle-class home. Solomon was the sister of artists Abraham Solomon (1823-1862) and Simeon Solomon (1840-1905).
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Rebecca Solomon (London 26 September 1832 – 20 November 1886 London) was a 19th-century English Pre-Raphaelite draftsman, illustrator, engraver, and painter of social injustices. She is the second of three children who all became artists, in a prominent Jewish family. …
Solomon’s artistic style was typical of popular 19th-century painting at the time and falls under the category of genre painting. She used her visual images to critique ethnic, gender and class prejudice in Victorian England. When Solomon started painting genre scenes, her work demonstrated an observant eye for class, ethnic and gender discrimination. Solomon’s paintings reflect a combination of interest in the theatre and commitment to social consciousness that is not exist in other artist’s painting in the nineteenth century.
Solomon painted in a more equivocal manner… She [the subject of the painting] is equally attractive and demure, but, by being painted from the side and against the background of a middle-class interior, the viewer is invited to reflect on her social status.
This is framed in a genre painting and by no means a piece with pretensions to social realism, but Solomon seems to be underlining the definite restrictions on this young woman’s position in society.
The pictures hanging behind her may contribute to that interpretation of the artist. They are not yet identified, but it seems that on the left we are shown an allegorical subject later than Gainsborough or Reynolds, depicting a young peasant boy or young peasant girl holding a dog in a landscape. On the right, a more specific engraving of a genre painting from Solomon’s own time showing what appears to be an itinerant family of street vendors. By placing his servant girl between these two paintings, Solomon seems to be asking us to compare.
José Luis Jiménez García. “La otra versión de la ‘Sherry Girl’,” on the Diario de Jerez website 07 June 2023 [Online] Cited 28/08/2024 Translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Rebecca Solomon (English, 1832-1886) A Young Teacher
1861
Oil on canvas
61 by 51cm
Tate and the Museum of the Home
Rebecca Solomon’s painting is a complex reflection on gender, race, religion and education in mid-nineteenth century London. As with many of her works, it considers women who worked in better-off households as professional carers. In A Young Teacher, Solomon modifies a traditional domestic scene between mother and child, with the surrounding books stressing the theme of learning. The woman at the centre of the image was modelled by Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, who became a prominent muse for many Victorian artists and featured in some of the most iconic paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite period. …
Believed to be the first Jewish woman to become a professional artist in England, Rebecca Solomon’s work shone a light on inequality and prejudice at a time when these subjects were far from mainstream. She was active in social reform movements, including as part of a group of 38 artists who petitioned the Royal Academy of Arts to open its schools to women.
Emily Osborn (English, 1828-1925) Nameless and Friendless. “The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty” (Proverbs: 10:15)
1857
Oil on canvas Support: 825 × 1038 mm Frame: 1042 × 1258 × 75 mm
Tate
Purchased with assistance from Tate Members, the Millwood Legacy and a private donor 2009
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED
Osborn exhibited widely and was supported by wealthy patrons. She was also part of the ‘rights of woman’ debate, campaigning for more public roles for women. Nameless and Friendless, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, dramatises the difficulties faced by women artists. Osborn shows a young woman offering a painting to a sceptical dealer. With no reputation (‘Nameless’) and no connections (‘Friendless’), she has little chance of a sale. Behind her, two leering men emphasise the impression of her isolation and vulnerability.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Emily Mary Osborn’s Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891)Nd (below)
Emily Mary Osborn (1828-1925) Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891) (installation view)
Nd
Oil on canvas
120 x 97cm
Girton College, University of Cambridge
Martha Darley Mutrie (British, 1824-1885) Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield
1855-1860
Oil on canvas Support: 821 × 632 mm Frame: 958 × 781 × 65 mm Photo: Tate (Seraphina Neville)
Martha Darley Mutrie is considered one of the leading painters of flowers active in Britain in the nineteenth century. She was born in Ardwick, near Manchester. She trained together with her sister, the painter Annie Feray Mutrie (1826-1893), under George Wallis (1811-1891) at the Manchester School of Design from 1844 to 1846, and also undertook private lessons with him. The sisters began exhibiting at the Royal Manchester Institution from 1845 and at the Royal Academy, London, showing there consistently from the early 1850s. Their work was regularly well received by the critics. Mutrie and her sister moved to London in 1854, where they painted flowers in interior settings, carefully arranged, and also outdoors in mock natural settings.
Despite the prominence of women artists painting still lifes and flowers, the men practitioners of the genre, such as George Lance (1802-1864) and William Henry ‘Birds Nest’ Hunt (1790-1864), received greater critical and institutional attention. Martha and Annie Mutrie achieved success that was otherwise rare for women working as artists at the time.
The art critic John Ruskin admired both artists’ work and wrote about one of Annie’s pictures in his review of the 1855 Royal Academy exhibition. In his review Ruskin suggested that she abandon artificial compositions and paint instead ‘some banks of flowers in wild country, just as they grow’ (John Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, 1855). This painting might be seen as a response to Ruskin’s insight and the advances in science that in the 1850s brought a new focus to the study of nature, with arguments over beauty and truth.
Florence Claxton (British, 1838-1920) ‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley
1861
Oil on canvas
Martin Beisly Fine Art, London
In the 1850s, Claxton became part of the UK’s first organised movement for women’s rights. Woman’s Work satirises women’s opportunities for professional employment. At its centre a group of women fawn at the feet of a man seated below a statue of the Golden Calf – a false idol. Confined by
a surrounding wall, doors to professions such as medicine are shut to the women. Only the artist Rosa Bonheur has managed to scale the wall’s heights. The painting was exhibited at London’s National Institution for Fine Arts in 1861 and received mixed reviews. Some praised its comic strength but others described it as ‘vulgar’.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
1865
Albumen print
Wilson Centre of Photography
Annie Keene (1842/3-1901) was an artist’s model at the Royal Academy Schools. Cameron showed Keene’s portrait at the 1866 Hampshire and Isle of Wight Loan Exhibition, and it was for sale at her 1868 exhibition at London’s German Gallery. In this photograph, Cameron’s shallow depth-of-field gives a bold effect. Her friend, the scientist and photographic innovator John Herschel (1792-1871), praised the portrait as ‘a most astonishing piece of high relief – She is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air’.
Butler specialised in battle paintings, challenging society’s expectations of women artists. The exhibition of The Roll Call at the Royal Academy in 1874 was one of the greatest art sensations of the nineteenth century. It was praised by Academicians and hung ‘on the line’ (the most prestigious, eye-level position). The painting proved so popular with the public that a policeman had to be stationed nearby to protect the adjacent paintings. Queen Victoria summoned the work to Buckingham Palace for a private viewing, and the copyright sold for the enormous sum of £1,200.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
The Roll Call captured the imagination of the country when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, turning the artist into a national celebrity. So popular was the painting that a policeman had to be stationed before it to hold back the crowds and it went on to tour the country in triumph. The painting’s focus on the endurance and bravery of ordinary soldiers without reference to the commanders of the army accorded with the mood of the times and the increasing awareness of the need for social and military reforms.
Though the public had been exposed to other images of the Crimean War, primarily prints, photographs and newspaper illustrations, never before had the plight of ordinary soldiers been portrayed with such realism. Butler researched her subject by studying A. W. Kinglake’s seminal history of the Crimean War, as well as by consulting veterans of the Crimea, several of whom served as models for the painting. She also painstakingly sought out uniforms and equipment from the Crimean period in order to be correct in the smallest military details. The sombre mood and simple yet dramatic composition Butler achieved in The Roll Call vividly epitomised the grimness not only of the Crimean War but of all wars.
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Louise Jopling’s Through the Looking-Glass 1875 (below); and at right, Jopling’s A Modern Cinderella 1875 (below)
Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933) Through the Looking-Glass
1875
Oil paint on canvas Support: 539 × 437 mm
Tate
Purchased with funds provided by the Nicholas Themans Trust and Tate Patrons 2024 Photo: Tate (Sonal Bakrania)
This is a self-portrait Jopling made while pregnant with her son, Lindsay, in 1875.
Jopling was one of the most successful and best-known women artists of the late nineteenth century. She exhibited regularly and, from the 1880s, ran her own art school for women. Jopling hosted receptions and established connections with many artists and art dealers. She carefully planned the exhibition of her work by choosing venues appropriate to each painting’s scale and ambition. Jopling sent this self-portrait to the Society of Lady Artists in 1875. In the same year, A Modern Cinderella, hanging nearby, was shown at the Royal Academy. Both works were purchased by the dealer Agnew: this work for £26, but Cinderella for £262.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Tabitha Barber, curator of the exhibition, said: “What’s happened to Jopling’s legacy is the story of what’s happened to most women artists … They have been regarded, studied and judged differently.”
Jopling, who in 1901 became one of the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists, was a celebrated artist in her day, Barber said. Her patrons included the de Rothschild family, and the Grosvenor Gallery founders Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay. “At a time when women weren’t allowed to be members of the Royal Academy, her works were exhibited there almost every year and spoken about in the press. She was reviewed by male art critics, and reviewed well.”
Jopling’s paintings were also commercially successful, selling for some of the highest prices that British female artists could command – albeit far less than their male contemporaries.
“She is among a handful of female artists who were society figures and household names – and it just seems so astonishing that they’re so little known now,” said Barber.
Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933) A Modern Cinderella
1875
Oil on canvas Support: 910 × 700 mm
Private collection
Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933) A Modern Cinderella
1875
Oil on canvas Support: 910 × 700 mm
Private collection
A Modern Cinderella shows a model removing her fine clothes at the end of a painting session. A glimpse of Jopling’s easel can be seen in the mirror’s reflection. In 1875, Jopling exhibited this work at the Royal Academy. There, the model’s naked shoulder was cause for criticism. Although one reviewer thought it was ‘quite harmless’, a picture dealer’s wife reportedly said that ‘she could never hang such a thing in her house’. Jopling also showed the painting at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where she had also trained.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
If this is, indeed, a self-portrait, Jopling has painted herself as somewhere in the liminal space between the social groups she simultaneously belonged to and was excluded from. Despite Jopling’s notoriety and prominence among high-class Pre-Raphaelite artist circles, she experienced a high degree of discrimination. In 1883, she was commissioned to paint a portrait for 150 guineas but lost her employment in favour of Sir John Everett Millais, who requested 1000 guineas for the same project (Clement). In the traditional circles of high society, Jopling was looked down upon for pursuing a career in the fine arts, which was inherently a masculine task. The woman in the image is either taking the dress off or putting it on, but either way, has turned her back to her easel, which could be interpreted as forfeiting a part of her true identity to fit either end of the accepted spectrum of femininity. The underclothing she portrays herself in fit the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic style of dress, which fit natural waists and emphasised a woman’s beauty through medieval and Greek-inspired silhouettes (Shrimpton, Jayne. Victorian Fashion. Shire Publications, 2016). The inclusion of this white aesthetic dress, as well as the scandalous drop of the strap is a signal of societal rebellion against traditional beauty norms. The woman in the image could also be read as shedding the skin of the two dresses before her to reveal her true, natural, artistic self below.
Marianne Stokes (Austrian, 1855-1927) The Passing Train
1890
Oil on canvas Support: 600 × 760 mm Frame: 885 × 955 mm
Private collection
Marianne Stokes (née Preindlsberger; 1855-1927) was an Austrian painter. She settled in England after her marriage to Adrian Scott Stokes (1854-1935), the landscape painter, whom she had met in Pont-Aven. Stokes was considered one of the leading women artists in Victorian England.
Annie Louisa Swynnerton ARA (British, 1844-1933) Mater Triumphalis
1892
Paris, musée d’Orsay
Donated by Edmund Davis, 1915
Swynnerton campaigned for women’s suffrage, access to professional training, and equal opportunities. She rebelled against the belief that ‘women could not paint’. Exhibited at the New Gallery in 1892, Mater Triumphalis was regarded as a bold work. It brought Swynnerton international recognition, winning a medal at the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. Despite this, Swynnerton received mixed reviews from British critics. They were impressed by the artist’s skill and the painting’s ‘quivering life’ but found the ‘frank realism’ of the woman’s naked body disconcerting.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Henrietta Rae’s Psyche before the throne of Venus 1894 (below)
Henrietta Rae (British, 1859-1928) Psyche before the throne of Venus
1894
Oil paint on canvas Support: 1941 × 3058 × 31 mm Frame: 2525 × 3826 × 270 mm
Lent from a private collection, courtesy of Martin Beisly Fine Art
Rae was determined not to be pigeonholed as a ‘woman artist’. She painted classical nude compositions despite the belief that they were not a suitable subject for women artists. Against these odds, Psyche Before the Throne of Venus was a success at the 1894 Royal Academy Exhibition, and Rae received praise from critics as well as members of the Academy. The periodical The Englishwoman’s Review described the painting as ‘the most ambitious and successful woman’s work yet exhibited – one which could not have been executed a few years ago, when we had not the opportunity of studying from the life’.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest 1897
One of the most important pieces of art ever inspired by the New Forest was a painting by Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869-1958), entitled ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, when she was only 26 years old. It was an impressive canvas measuring 1537 x 3060 mm (approximately 5ft x 10ft) and was described as depicting ‘a wide glade in the forest, along which race a number of colts unwilling to relinquish their liberty and to fall into the hands of the four mounted lads who try to catch them’.[1] Lucy Kemp-Welch was born in Bournemouth, in 1869, and spent much of her time wandering in the New Forest, where she ‘personally studied the wild ponies in this pleasant part of England’.[2] Her love of horses and wild ponies remained with her all her life. In order to capture the energy and excitement of the pony drifts for ‘Colt Hunting’ she actually had the full-sized canvas transported to the Forest, where she sketched from life, as the commoners galloped their ponies past her. When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy it caused a sensation and was promptly purchased for £525.00.[3] The buyers were trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, who administered a large sum of money left in the will of Sir F. L. Chantrey to obtain works of art by British artists, in order to create a national collection. It was only the third time, since its creation in 1875, that the Chantrey Bequest had purchased artwork by a woman. Lucy Kemp-Welch became a celebrity overnight.[4]
In the same year that Lucy Kemp-Welch exhibited ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’, the Tate Galley was built and her painting was transferred to this new, public collection. However, ‘Colt Hunting’ was immediately archived and has never been publicly exhibited. Indeed, there are rumours that the Tate Gallery loaned the painting to the Royal Academy during the Blitz ‘in the hope that the Luftwaffe’s friendly bombs might rid them of this monstrous woman’s work for good’.[5] It is difficult to conceive of the prejudice against women in the late Victorian period and early 20th century, particularly women such as Lucy Kemp-Welch, who stepped out of the roles proscribed to them by a patriarchal society.[6] Her sympathies for the suffragette movement certainly didn’t endear her to the male-establishment figures that controlled the art world. She nevertheless continued to paint and made a successful, and award winning (Paris Salon) career as an artist.
Gwen John (Welsh, 1876-1939) Self-Portrait
1902
Oil on canvas
Tate
Purchased 1942 Photo: Tate (Mark Heathcote and Samuel Cole)
John exhibited this self-portrait at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1900. It was her debut as an exhibitor. The NEAC had been founded as a forward-thinking artists’ group, created out of dissatisfaction with the art establishment, exemplified by the conservative Royal Academy. Tutors from the Slade, where John had trained, were on the NEAC committee. Despite its progressive stance, in 1900 John was one of only 16 women exhibitors among 75 men. John’s choice to show a self-portrait was perhaps a deliberate assertion of her presence.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Here is a dilemma straight away: which should take precedence, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or as instance, evidence, expression of social history? It is an extremely complex remit…
[Laura] Knight is strongly represented with a sequence of cliff-edge paintings; but what about her near-namesake, Winifred Knights? The Deluge is a shattering masterpiece of British modernism, painted in 1920 and thus eligible, yet not here. And why are the ethereal and supremely original blue cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (1799-1871) missing from the niggardly photography section, along with Christina Broom (1862-1939), pioneering photojournalist, whose stirring portraits of suffragettes would have been so apt?
The show is thick with flowers, descending from Delany right down to Helen Allingham’s twee cottage gardens, all ready for their postcard reproductions. And if Allingham, then why not the visionary genius of Beatrix Potter? Weak pre-Raphaelite schlock fills the largest gallery, along with Victorian pieties such as Emily Osborn’s distressed gentlewoman, eyes downcast, awaiting the verdict of a dealer on her latest canvas, while two male artists leer in the background. Nameless and Friendless is terminally mawkish.
Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show. You see it in Ethel Wright’s fabulous 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval, in an arsenical green dress beneath a wallpaper of ludicrous fighting cocks, where Wright’s modern bravado exactly meets that of her sitter. And you see it in Gwen John’s immortal 1902 self-portrait, small and distanced, light catching her eyelashes in an atmosphere of hushed stillness, so direct and yet so self-contained: the momentous assertion of reticence.
That epochal image appears on the exhibition posters, perhaps promising too much. For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions. The theme of Now You See Us is undoubtedly riveting. The captions (and the excellent catalogue) are superbly written. But art is trumped by social history too often in this show, words overshadowing images.
Gwen John (Welsh, 1876-1939) Chloë Boughton-Leigh (1868-1947)
1904-1908
Oil on canvas
58.4 x 38.1cm
Tate
Purchased 1925
Gwendolen Mary John (22 June 1876 – 18 September 1939) was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely related tones. Although in her lifetime, John’s work was overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus and her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, awareness and esteem for John’s artistic contributions has grown considerably since her death.
Gwen John trained at the Slade School of Art in London, where her brother Augustus was also a student. She settled in Paris in 1904, working as a model, becoming Rodin’s mistress and immersing herself in the artistic world of the metropolis. She lived in France for the rest of her life, exhibiting on both sides of the Channel. The portrait shown here is of a Paris friend, Chloë Boughton-Leigh. The subdued colouring, short foreground and self-absorption of the sitter create a deeply intense atmosphere. John showed it in London, at the New English Art Club.
Text from the WikiArt website
Minna Keene (née Bergmann, Canadian born Germany, 1861-1943) Decorative Study No. 1, Pomegranates
c. 1906
Carbon print
The subject of this photograph is believed to be of Violet Keene, Minna Keene’s daughter.
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Ethel Wright’s The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale1912 (below)
Ethel Wright (British, 1866-1939) The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale (installation view)
1912
Oil on canvas
Private collection
This portrait of suffragette and women’s rights activist Una Dugdale Duval (1879-1975) was exhibited at the Stafford Gallery in October 1912. Its flat areas of colour and bold outlines represent a stylistic shift for Wright, who had exhibited at the Royal Academy since the 1880s. Wright shows Duval as cultured and sophisticated, dressed in green, a suffrage colour. Wright made the work the same year Duval made national news for her refusal to promise to obey her husband during their marriage vows. In 1913, Duval published a pamphlet, Love and Honour but Not Obey.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Ethel Wright (British, 1866-1939) The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale
1912
Oil on canvas
Private collection
In 1913, Bell left the Friday Club for the short-lived exhibiting society, the Grafton Group. It included artists who were experimenting with post-impressionism. She was also a founding member of the Omega Workshops. Based in Bloomsbury’s Fitzroy Square, the Workshops aimed to remove the false divisions between fine and decorative arts. The mantelpiece in this painting was in Bell’s house at 46 Gordon Square in London. The objects on it include handmade paper flowers from the Omega Workshops. Bell’s use of an unconventional low viewpoint, fractured, abstracted forms and bright colours show her exploring different techniques associated with twentieth-century art movements.
In 1918, Airy received a commission from the Imperial War Museum, thereby becoming Britain’s first official woman war artist. Her 1.7 by 1.8-metre canvases depict munitions production and war-related heavy industry. She later recalled the hot and dangerous conditions in which she worked. A former Slade student, Airy enjoyed a high public profile, won through exhibition and good reviews at the Royal Academy. In 1915, an art critic hailed her as ‘the most accomplished artist of her sex’. Airy was aware, however, of the prejudice women artists still faced. Galleries and buyers, she said, felt ‘safer with a man’.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Anna Airy (English, 1882-1964) Study for ‘The L Press: Forging the Jacket of an 18-inch Gun, Armstrong-Whitworth Works, Openshaw’
1918
Oil on canvas
Private collection
Olive Edis (British, 1876-1955) War
1919
Carbon print on paper
Wilson Centre for Photography
Edis was Britain’s first woman war photographer. She was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to photograph the activities of servicewomen on duty in France and Flanders. This bleak, blasted landscape captures the impact of the First World War.
Text from the exhibition large print guide
Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Dame Ethel Walker’s Decoration The Excursion of Nausicaa 1920 (below)
Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (Scottish, 1861-1951) Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa
1920
Oil on canvas
1835 × 3670 mm
Tate
Purchased 1924 Photo: Tate
Writing to J. B. Manson (Monday, 2 June, no year given, but almost certainly 1924), the artist described her work thus:’… Nausicaa early one lovely summer’s morning goes to her father and mother – the King and Queen – to ask permission to have a waggon and mules given to her to take her and her attendants and to fill it with the clothes of the palace that require washing, also with dainties and wine and good food for a forthcoming picnic – and go down to the river adjoining the sea to wash them – which he gives her. On arriving at the river they unharness the mules and are unpacking or unloading the waggons of the clothes and the food for the picnic, and are beginning to wash them in the river. A little wood divides the sea from the river where the goat girl – kneeling by the tree near her goats – hears the strange voices that are sounding in her usually silent little wood. To show it is the sea a girl, nude, has stepped up on to the bank after bathing….’ The story is based on Book VI of the Odyssey: ‘… they spread/The raiment orderly along the beach/Where dashing tides …/… leaving the garments, stretch’d/ In noon-day fervour of the sun, to dry.’
In her lifetime Scottish artist Ethel Walker was celebrated for her trailblazing paintings of the female form. A teacher before she painted fulltime, she developed her own unique style – large, mural-like paintings, which she called her ‘decorations.’ Walker often painted male and female nudes confidently placing female sensuality at the centre of her work, as seen in Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa (1920). Its dream-like vision of a feminist utopia was ahead of its time.
Working steadily for decades, she achieved many professional milestones, exhibiting around the world and representing Britain at the Venice Biennale four times. In 1943, Walker was made a Dame of the British Empire, and after her death The Times called her ‘the most important woman artist of her time.’ Despite this, it is only now that her artistic legacy is finally being recognised.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream exhibition poster
An offer you can’t refuse
“The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage… Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry.” (Text from the CCCB website)
To me, there has always be something slightly askew, slightly out of kilter about the “American dream”. It promotes a generalised simulation of a imaginary reality, sold as a lifestyle, more fiction than fact. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the everyday reality of life, entirely on the side of demand: I want therefore I must have.
This desire must be satiated in the nuclear family, the white picket fence, the idyllic family home, the loveable children – as much a surface that reflects the approbation of others as for the sustenance of the self. As Anthony Giddens observes we are inescapably involved in a
“‘reflexive project of the self’: this project is reflexive because it involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning and ordering of all elements of our lives appearances and performances in order to marshal them into a coherent narrative called ‘the self’. We have to interpret the past and plan the future in relation to an identity we are attempting to constitute in a particularly immediate and transient social present. Consumerism is central to this self-obsession. This is partly because we not only have to choose a self, but (as Foucault’s line of argument also indicates) have to constitute ourselves as a self who choses, a consumer.”1
The American Dream endeavours to direct the identity we are attempting to constitute (through consumerism), so that it fits into a particularly conformist idea of a wholesome life: patriarchal, hegemonic, puritan (most important in America), god fearing, white – a particularly hyperreal simulation of a world that never existed in the first place. An imaginary construction.2
Photographs reinforce this “imaginary” state of being, this desire for the American Dream. As the wonderful Victor Burgin observes,
“The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading. … With most photographs we see, […] decoding and investiture takes place instantaneously, unselfconsciously, ‘naturally’; but it does take place – the wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude. The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ [as in fictive] in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has a projected image.”3 (My bold and italics)
The photographs of the American Dream, then, deny an impoverished reality in favour of a desired imaginary plenitude. You too can live the dream, because you have seen the evidence of the projected image, and this imaginary identification can have very real effects.
In the desire for the dream we witness (elsewhere in the world) the egocentric obsession of some of the builders in the British series “Grand Designs” where people mortgage themselves up to the hilt, become sick, have marriage breakdowns and can’t finish the project, because of a dream… to build huge houses with 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms that no one in their right mind needs to build for 2 people. Or the case of the Australian Melissa Caddick who, in a Ponzi scheme stole A$30 million from investors, including her friends and family, in order to appear a successful business woman. “Caddick used the proceeds of her crimes to acquire “all the trappings of wealth” and that her “success was all a façade and the financial services business was an elaborate front for Ms. Caddick’s Ponzi scheme”.”4
Ego is reinforced by the image reflected back to us by the photograph.
Christopher Lasch comments that, “The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history…”5
Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.
Thankfully, some of the contemporary artists in this posting (I particularly like the work of Weronika Gęsicka) undermine the utopian ideal through wit, humour and critical inquiry.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991
2/ “In sociology, the imaginary as a Lacanian term refers to an illusion and fascination with an image of the body as coherent unity, deriving from the dual relationship between the ego and the specular or mirror image… “The term ‘imaginary’ is obviously cognate with ‘fictive’ but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects.””
David Macey, “Introduction”, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1994, p. xxi quoted in “Imaginary (sociology)” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024
3/ Victor Burgin (ed.,). Thinking Photography. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, pp. 146-148.
4/ Farid Assaf SC quoted in Kate McClymont. “Melissa Caddick’s ‘trappings of wealth’ a front for her Ponzi scheme”. The Sydney Morning Herald 29 June 2021 in “Melissa Caddick,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024
5/ Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W.Norton and Company, New York, 1978, p. 48.
Many thankx to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream
Philipp Engel, curator of the exhibition “Suburbia”, examines the origin and vast expansion of residential neighbourhoods in the United States, an urban model centred on constructing large swathes of single-family homes on the outskirts of cities. Engel reflects on the allure that suburban landscapes have stirred in Western culture while highlighting the main issues and contradictions of the model, including segregation, safety paranoia and unsustainable consumption of water and energy.
Introduction
Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976) Chandler, Arizona
2006
From Mowing the Lawn portfolio
Impressió digital Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
Who hasn’t longed for the American dream? A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema, and analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.
Now, when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on the outskirts of cities, it is a good moment to analyse the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation.
The dream of living in a house with a swimming pool is still very much alive today and has been exported all over the world. The exhibition shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid.
With abundant historical material, period documentaries, photographs, paintings, films and series, novels and magazines, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition places us in the mental paradise of the suburb and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents the work of foremost creators who, from different points of view, help us to take a critical look at the famed American way of life: Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Rodrigo Fresán, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronika Gesicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Todd Solondz, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan.
Text from the CCCB website
Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938) Land. Provincetown
1976
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra
Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938) Dusk. New Jersey
1978
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra
The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage. Suburbia. Building the American Dream traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal shared far and wide by literature, television, advertising and cinema, and analyses the most controversial aspects of an urban planning model that has spread beyond US territory and reached our shores. Journalist Philipp Engel curates this exhibition with geographer Francesc Muñoz collaborating as adviser on the model in the local context.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.
Since the 1990s most of the American population has lived in this sprawling urban mass that has continued to spread, even beyond US borders. At a time when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on city outskirts, the exhibition analyses the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation. It also shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid. With abundant historical material, photographs, paintings, audiovisuals, literature, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition situates us in the mental paradise of the model of residential development inspired by American suburbia, and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream decodes an almost abstract landscape that is still valid in pop culture. It does so through the work of foremost creators who help us take a critical look at the famed American way of life. It includes works by Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronicka Gęsicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan, among others.
Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) [Image from LOOK – Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]
20th December 1957
Film negative
Look magazine photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Gregory Crewdson (below)
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches
American photographer Gregory Crewdson is best known for his uncanny images of deceptively serene suburban life. Using Hollywood film techniques and elaborate sets, Crewdson creates what he calls “frozen moments”: meticulously staged scenes whose narrative meaning remains a mystery. Throughout this series, special attention is paid to light. The twilight setting favoured by the photographer functions as a metaphor, an eerie evocation of the darkness on the edge of town.
Crewdson created this twelve-part portfolio, Dream House, as a commission for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The cinematic character of these frozen vignettes is underscored by the use of Hollywood actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others) whose celebrity contrasts with the “Anytown” anonymity of their environments.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Julianne Moore (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches
Sections of the exhibition
Planning A Dream
When the Industrial Revolution reached the USA in the first half of the 19th century, big cities became engines of progress, but they were also seen as dangerous places, in contrast with the opulent nature of the New World. With the emergence of the railway, the tram and the automobile, the mobility revolution prompted the gradual colonisation of city outskirts, transforming the countryside into residential neighbourhoods.
From Llewellyn Park (New Jersey) to Tuxedo Park (New York), throughout the 19th century the first gated communities began to pop up across the United States. At the end of the century, after the West was won, the appearance of the tram gave the middle classes access to the periphery, giving rise to a new type of housing that led to an orderly arrangement of city grids. But it wasn’t until the popularisation of the famous Ford Model T that the US landscape was radically transformed, crisscrossed by roads that became freeways. The automobile became a symbol of freedom, marking the birth of the suburbs that were to spring up everywhere.
This first section includes historical material like the original lithograph View of New York by John William Hill (1836); The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher, the bible of “domestic feminism”; a Ford T Touring (1923) produced by General Motors, and films like The Suburbanite (1908), among other Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics.
Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892) Villa for David Codwise, near New Rochelle, NY (project; elevation and four plans)
1835
Pen and ink, watercolour, graphite Sheet: 14 5/16 x 9 in. (36.4 x 22.9 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain
Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892) Ericstan, for John J. Herrick, Tarrytown, New York (perspective)
1855
Watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper
25 5/16 x 30in. (64.3 x 76.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain
Davis’ most successful castellated villa was built for dry-goods merchant John J. Herrick. The design was dominated by an enormous three-story circular tower facing west over the Hudson River. The tower housed an extraordinary circular parlor that had an intricately vaulted ceiling springing from a massive central cluster of delicate Gothic columns. Ericstan was demolished in 1944.
After Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892) Friend & Aub (Publisher Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Map of Llewellyn Park and Villa Sites, on Eagle Ridge in Orange & West Bloomfield
1857
Lithograph
14 7/16 x 23 7/16 in. (36.7 x 59.6cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain
Morse & Fronti (Charles W. Morse and J. Fronti) Residence of Mr. E. Hooker, Fremont Ave., Orange, N.J.
1860
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
The New York Public Library
Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) Sunnyside on the Hudson
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) Sunnyside on the Hudson (detail)
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) American railroad scene: lightning express trains leaving the junction
1874
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross. August Gast & Co. New York
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress
Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross. August Gast & Co. New York (detail)
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress
Anonymous photographer
Bain News Service (publisher) Skaters on the lake at Tuxedo Park
1910
Glass negative
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Anonymous photographer Thomas Edison in the garden of his residence in Glenmont
1917
Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey
Anonymous photographer General Motors Pavilion: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes. New York World’s Fair. General Motors – Crowds leading into Futurama
1939
New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
Public domain
Catalog of the Aladdin company selling houses by mail
1950
Courtesy Historic New England
Federal Housing Administration, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota
c. 1950
Courtesy Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minneapolis
The advertisement reads, “With a small down payment your rent money will buy a home. Consult your architect, builder, material dealer or any participating financial institution. Federal Housing Administration.”
The Suburban Room
The suburban explosion was first and foremost demographic, occurring as World War II soldiers returned, eager to set up home. There was no room for them in the crowded cities. With the support of the state, which offered generous loans, suburbs were built using the Fordist assembly-line production logic. It was the “American way of life”, the start of a collective dream that fascinated the whole world.
And so the baby boom took place in 11 million single-family homes fitted with all kinds of electrical domestic appliances, presided over by a brand new television set on which the new suburbanites watched idealised versions of themselves with identical skin colour and the same war experiences, age, mortgage and feeling of uprootedness. The media echoed this phenomenon, and cinema and literature reflected this standardised landscape in which a wife waited at home for her husband with a drink for him in her hand, children went everywhere by bicycle, and everyone had barbecues on Sundays.
Sponsored by the state, Suburbia became a paradise that excluded racial minorities. But little by little, by the sixties, the gates of paradise were opened to African Americans and other minorities, giving rise to a white exodus, the white flight.
As well as a variety of historical material, this section reviews sitcoms portraying the suburbs, from the 1940s to the present day. It also includes the famous illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell and a broad selection of the photographs that make up Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972), the first book of photographs about this American urban planning model.
Arthur S. Siegel (American, 1913-1978) Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbours’ attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Mounted police and whites
Detroit 1942
Library of Congress
Public domain
General Electric advertisement It’s a promise
1945
Private collection, Barcelona
Anonymous photographer Aerial view of Levittown
1949
Courtesy Levittown Public Library
Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines
1947-1962
Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines (details)
1947-1962
Getting to Work. The Trials to U.S. commuters Time, January 18, 1960
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona
John Cheever Time, March 27, 1964
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) New Kids in the Neighbourhood
1967
Lithograph
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) Suburbia, Cul de sac, Pleseanton, California
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman.)
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan
The Residential Nightmare
And night fell on Suburbia. What had been a dream became a nightmare. The idea of a safe, healthy, happy place was gradually contaminated with fears, terrors and paranoias. Doors were bolted and alarms installed. After all, in the American Gothic tradition, the house, often haunted, had always been a source of horror – evil lurked there. With the appearance of mass-produced housing, a new sub genre called Suburban Gothic was consolidated, and began to manifest itself both in literature and in cinema. Unlike the traditional Gothic, in this new landscape the family residence was no longer tied to a specific territory, as it had been in New England; now, with its white picket fence and green lawn, it could be anywhere in the country. And evil came from outside, it threatened to invade the home and even undermine it. Under the guise of shiny normality, American suburbs always conceal cracks through which terror creeps.
To illustrate this residential nightmare, we take in historical materials of the atomic age, photographs of the dark side of suburbia by Amy Stein, Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, Angela Strassheim and Gabriele Galimberti, and Kate Wagner’s installation, McMansionHell. Alberto Ortega, an artist from Seville resident in the US who has devoted himself to painting the suburbs at night, presents two works for the first time at the CCCB.
Todd Hido (American, b. 1968) Untitled #2214
1998
From the series House Hunting
Angela Strassheim (American, b. 1969) Untitled (Elsa)
2005 Left Behind series
Courtesy of the artist
Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977) Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977) Avery Skipalis (33) – Tampa, Florida
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Avery Skipalis (33) stands with her firearms in front of her house in Tampa, Florida, USA. Her son looks on from a window. Avery joined the US Air Force when she was 17, and after serving in the UAE, Japan and Germany, left to start a company that offers firearms safety classes to adults and children.
Alberto Ortega (American born Spain, b. 1976) Annunciation
2023
Oil on aluminium panel
Courtesy of the artist
Alberto Ortega (Sevilla, Spain 1976) creates oil paintings made after miniature sets that he builds as references. The small-scale sets enable him to recreate suburban scenes using details that recall the 1950s. Since he’s able to control the angle and point of view, the lighting, the location of every element, much like a film director would do, his works have a strong cinematic feel.
As an immigrant to the United States, Alberto is intrigued by American suburban life as depicted in film, literature, and visual art. Through these images of American homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods, he portrays society and some of its contradictions. These scenes represent hopes and dreams, the threat of their failure, and alienation.
Text from the Alberto Ortega website
Kate Wagner (American, b. 1993) Observations from McMansion Hell
2023
Digital print on palboard
Courtesy of the artist
McMansion Hell is a blog that humorously critiques McMansions, large suburban homes typically built from the 1980s to 2008 and known for their stylistic attempt to create the appearance of affluence using mass-produced architecture. The website is run by Kate Wagner, an architectural writer. …
The blog uses Wagner’s commentary atop images of the interiors and exteriors of McMansions, using arrows to note features she finds questionable or in poor taste. Besides critiquing the homes themselves, the website also criticises the perceived material culture of wastefulness McMansions can represent, gives anecdotes of situations when McMansions have been a poor financial investment, and provides other essays on urban planning and architectural history. The blog offers subscriptions with bonus content, generating sufficient funding for Wagner to work on the blog full-time.
The appearance of New Urbanism in the 1990s began to herald the inevitable death of Suburbia due to the announced depletion of oil that has not yet occurred. Meanwhile, Suburbia continues to spread, transform and diversify. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans live in sprawl and single-family homes, representing 75% of the residential areas where new generations continue to dream of living. This is a new suburbia that is more open but also more unequal.
This suburb is made up of very diverse communities, as captured by the cameras of the photographers Sheila Pree Bright (who portrays African American life around Atlanta) and Jessica Chou (who immortalises the Asian community in Monterrey Park, California). New lifestyles also proliferate there, like at Huntington Beach, a “contemporary suburb” and surfing capital featured in the works of artist and skateboarder Ed Templeton.
This section also focuses on the environmental impact of this highly polluting city model, through the apocalyptic bonsai of artist Thomas Doyle and the satellite photographs of Benjamin Grant, a lethal panorama of the effects of the sprawling city.
Thomas Doyle (American, b. 1976) Proxy (Haven Ln.)
2012
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist
Thomas Doyle work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past – whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.
Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984) Untitled #16
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw
For her series “Traces”, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka searched through various online image databases for photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s that in her eyes reflect the American way of life at that time. Many of these scenes are full of clichés, showing happy-looking people in an apparently perfect world. The exact origin of the pictures is not verifiable. As a result, they are a mixture of advertisements and private photos. Gęsicka manipulates the idyllic scenes in a playful way by digitally distorting the images. In doing so, she does not follow a strict pattern, but instead decides intuitively what detail she finds fascinating and will edit. In this way, the rather stereotypical scenes of suburban American life are transformed into a humorous, but also uncomfortable reality. Covered faces, deformed bodies and peculiar superimpositions create a distorted version of the American dream. Gęsicka’s photos are characterised by a discomforting, almost oppressive mood that sometimes only reveals itself at second glance: young men at a tea dance, whose heads are submerged in the cleavages of their oversized female partners, family members hidden behind a curtain at the dinner table, or a father coming home from work, separated by a trench from his children, who are running towards him.
In “Traces”, Weronika Gęsicka questions how we perceive images. In doing so, she makes us aware that even the medium of photography, which allegedly reflects reality, is not objective. Each photograph merely satisfies a perception of what is happening and, in the photographer’s eye, remains a subjective likeness. By modifying the images, she is playing with the observer, who is initially confident that he can quickly classify and identify the scene – until he notices that nothing in these pictures is as it seems at first glance.
Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984) Untitled #52
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw
Ed Templeton (American, b. 1972) Contemporary Suburbium
2017
Digital printing on baryta paper
Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
Jessica Chou (American born Taiwan, b. 1985) The Mark Keppel High School Dance Team at the 2019 Miss Dance Drill Team USA National Dance Competition
2019
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Overview takes its inspiration from Daily Overview – an Instagram account established by author Benjamin Grant. Since he began the project in December 2013, his daily posts have both delighted and challenged his audience from all corners of the globe. For Overview, Grant has curated and created more than 200 original images by stitching together numerous high-resolution satellite photographs. With each Overview, Grant aims to not only inspire a fresh perspective of our planet but also encourage a new understanding of what human impact looks like. He lives and rides his bike in New York City.
The formation of Suburbia as a cultural phenomenon in Catalonia is a reality historically ignored by narratives about the Catalan process of urbanisation, too focused on city growth and the ideological differentiation between an urban, Barcelona-based Catalonia and an “inner” Catalonia, the birthplace of what still today we call the “countryside”.
Suburban Catalonia shows how, in many territories, urban growth no longer corresponds to the well-known metaphor of city growth as an “oil stain”. In fact, an endless mass of oil stains has spread across the territory, giving rise to the same cloned reality everywhere: regional urban sprawl. The sprawl that is so commonplace today developed with the motorisation of society starting in the latter half of the 20th century as part and parcel of a very heterogeneous cultural discourse: the ideological propaganda of the American way of life mixed with local traditions derived from criticism of the built-up, crowded industrial city popularly disseminated in expressions such as “la caseta i l’hortet” (a little house and a garden) that idealised rural life. The path leading from those initial suburban choices to today’s regional urban sprawl is not a straight one, making the Catalan suburb a world yet to be discovered.
Christopher Willan has made a photographic reportage about the Catalan suburban world specially for the exhibition, which also includes Blanca Munt’s installation Mira-Sol Alert about the neighbourhood’s paranoid state of alert and an audiovisual piece by filmmaker León Siminiani that closes the exhibition.
Pere Torné Esquius (Spanish, 1879-1936) The rocking chair (El balancí)
1913
Oil on canvas
National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona
For different reasons, the singular work of the painter, illustrator and cartoonist Pere Torné Esquius (Barcelona 1879 – Flavancourt, France, 1936) doesn’t fit in with either the modernist proposals or the noucentista style (turn of the century), even though the latter considered him to be one of theirs.
Settled in Paris from 1905 onwards, although he would often return to Barcelona to regularly exhibit there, his work, of apparent simplicity, responded to a certain primitivism which was somewhat naive and with a strong French influence. His painting, highly singular, maintained pictorial and atmospheric values which provided the whole production with a sense of unity.
The favourite topics of Torné Esquius were interior or secluded spaces, such as gardens or living rooms, humble or of artisan extraction. It is worth highlighting, very often, the absence of the human figure and the main presence of inanimate elements that on occasions would cause a disturbing or even alarming effect. He also produced other genres such as landscapes or portraits.
Despite the fact that he was a painter, his professional work was based on illustration, focused on three main lines: children’s literature, the illustration of literary texts and the collaboration in magazines and periodical publications, often satirical, such as Papitu, Picarol or Le Rire, amongst others.
XXIII Barcelona International Exhibition Fair, 1955. USA Pavilion. OITF: Office of International Trade Fair. Single-family house model: “house beautiful prefabricated”
1955
Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia
Barcelona Metropolitan Area Orthophoto. Dispersed urbanisation in the municipality of Corbera de Llobregat
2015
Blanca Munt (Spanish, b. 1997) Mira-sol alert
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
In 2019, photographer Blanca Munt engaged in a neighbourhood chat group created to surveil her own neighbourhood and alert to any potential home burglaries or other suspicious activity. What is initially presented as an effective tool for the neighbours soon becomes a source of speculation, suspicion and paranoia. The seemingly quiet community life in a neighbourhood of well-lit streets and conventional homes founders due to the actual burglaries, but also due to the disintegration of the idea of community when personal security is at stake: mistrust, typically based on suspicious appearance or behaviour, now extends to any neighbours who fail to rigorously conform to the group’s purpose.
With a clean and sober design reminiscent of a real estate or security company brochure, the dispassionate pictures portrayed in Mira-sol Alert intertwine with the mental images stemming from an inflamed rhetoric, which gradually take shape as we learn the self-interested views of the different actors in this landscape – neighbours, suspects, police officers, local authorities – and which appeal strongly to our fears and contradictions. In her own words, Blanca Munt calls for a “reflection on the tension between the privilege of living in a peaceful place and the constant sense of lurking threat encouraged by our current culture of fear.”
Christopher Willan (British lives Spain) Sant Quirze del Vallès
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Christopher Willan (British lives Spain) Els Trullols Park-1
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
The Curators
Philipp Engel: Graduate in Modern Literature from the University of Toulouse, with a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis. After ten years in the music sales and distribution business, he started to work as a cultural journalist, specializing in cinema and literature. He is currently a contributor to various periodicals, such as Cultura(s), El Mundo, Cinemanía, Sofilm and Coolt.
Francesc Muñoz: Lecturer in Urban Geography, director of the Observatory of Urban Planning at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He has received prizes such as the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis Attending to Human Values in Engineering (UPC, 2004) and the Bonaplata Award for the exhibition The Light Factory, about the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs (2014). He has curated shows such as the commemorative exhibition of 30 years of democratic town councils, Local, Local! The City to Come (CCCB, 2010), and the exhibition Architectures on the Waterfront (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2019), and was a member of the Cerdà Year Advisory Board (2010).
Press release from the CCCB
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona Phone: (+34) 933 064 100
Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 11.00 – 20.00
Closed Monday
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Ivory Soap It Floats Painting for Ivory soap advertisement, 1900 Gouache on board Private collection Image courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Featured in mainstream national magazines, ads for Ivory soap often depicted scenes of conventional domesticity. Some, however, were erotic, like this one by Leyendecker featuring a man in a floor-length robe, whose crotch is suggestively rendered.
The Eye of the Beholder
“Leyendecker’s subjects exemplify an elite white masculinity that was hardly representative of the diversity of the United States in his time, or since” observes Sonya Abrego. The artist’s subjects are white, cultured, privileged, “upholding racial, social and nationalist hierarchies”.
But how representations were and are understood depends on the eye of the beholder. At the time that Lyendecker was painting and illustrating commercial magazines his flirtatious subliminal erotic messages would have been all too decipherable to a knowing gay male readership – even as these very illustrations “passed” the scrutiny of heterosexual normativity. For gay men “passing” allowed them to hide their real identity and to fit into society without discrimination and fear of loosing their job, their home and/or going to jail.1 Leyendecker’s works both hide and transgress the taboo when they pass inspection.
For the initiated, Leyendecker’s paintings and illustrations were at the very heart of the subversion of hegemonic masculinity – “a practice that legitimises men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalised ways of being a man.”2 Witness the man holding the “stiff rod” of the golf club in Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, below); the knowing looks of the two men in Men and Woman, Arrow Shirts with Golf Clubs and Collie (1910, below); the camp hands on hip languid pose of the man on the Cover of Saturday Evening Post (June 29, 1907, below) and the butcher, hand of hip, frontal crotch shot with Janet Jackson garment malfunction / nipple exposure that is Cover of Collier’s (June 24, 1916, below). The fact that some of the paintings such as Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below) feature Leyendecker’s lover of 48 years Charles A. Beach, only adds to the surreptitious nature of the paintings societal relationship. Much as the gay movie star Rock Hudson had to keep his private and public lives separate in order to “pass”, so Leyendecker kept his gay relationship a secret from the public.
While the exhibition would like us to address Leyendecker’s work within a broader context (according to curator Donald Albrecht talking about the artist in “gender terms, racial terms, sexual terms,” treating him in an intersectional way) – that is, through “the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”3 – this is only, and can only ever be, a post-post-posterior inflection on the rump of his work, a point of view wholly constructed in the present (the word and concept becoming popular after 1989 when the term ‘intersectionality’, which has its roots in Black feminist activism, and was originally coined by American critical legal race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw). Attitudes may have changed over the years and in some parts of the world, but to believe that heterosexual Black, white or Asian men would have understood the intersectional relationships in Leyendecker’s work back in the day is contemporary fairy floss. While it would be nice to think of Leyendecker’s work in all it’s supposed intersectional glory this was not how the work was seen by the general public (and white men in particular) when it was produced and published.
Today the eye of the beholder can still be just as blinded and prejudiced… for the dominant stereotype of the body, that of the white male, constantly reinforces its value in a capitalist consumer society. Body processes are drawn into social relations through fashion, sport, body culture, etc and, “As soon as we are articulated as a male or female body, a raced, classed, or sexed body in the context of the larger culture, a subject position construed hierarchically is not far behind, due in part to that means of articulation, our language. We take up a position according to a dialectic of presence and lack in terms of our relative proximity (still generally connected to our biological bodies) to the monied white male as signifier.”4
What we can do in this case is to inform the ‘conditions of understanding’ of the beholder: in other words, by making the viewer informed of the processes of production we can undermine the “ability of dominant groupings to define their bodies and lifestyles as superior, worthy of reward, and as, metaphorically and literally, the embodiment of class.”5 While the self is a social construction it is still all to easy for the dominant hegemonic group within a culture or society to identify and impose a valuable body – for example, that of the muscular mesomorph or the body of the athlete (or super jock). What we must encourage are processes in society “which will make it extremely difficult for any one group to impose as hegemonic, as worthy of respect and deference across society, a single classificatory scheme of ‘valuable bodies’.”6
A difficult task but I believe a worthy one.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ “Passing is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category, such as racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age and/or disability status, that is often different from their own. Passing may be used to increase social acceptance in order to cope with stigma by removing stigma from the presented self and could result in other social benefits as well. Thus, passing may serve as a form of self-preservation or self-protection in instances where expressing one’s true or prior identity may be dangerous.”
3/ Definition of intersectionality by Oxford Languages on the Google website
4/ Leslie Heywood. Dedication To Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, p. 12.
5/ Chris Schilling. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 140.
6/ Ibid., p. 143.
Many thankx to the New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
“An effeminate man … expresses his abdication of power. For a man to behave effeminately is an expression of the paradox. With each flap of the wrist he slides deeper into the underclass and, in so doing, betrays the birthright of men to mythic power. Such gestures are violations of masculinity, insults to the meaning of manhood. This is why they are met with such contempt by so many, including many gay men who long for the power of patriarchy.”
Brian Pronger. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990, p. 221.
“The Arrow collar man – handsome, well-groomed, and always dapper in crisp shirts with starched white collars – was a pop culture icon. He was so dashing that women who weren’t quite familiar with the idea of a brand personification yet, wrote to Arrow’s parent company hoping they could meet him. He shares a lot in common with the Gibson Girl of the same era: an elegant, youthful ideal of American beauty. But unlike Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrated feminine creation, which he insisted was an amalgam of modern American women of his time, The Arrow Collar Man was originally modelled after a specific person, Charles Beach, who happened to also be Leyendecker’s partner. The two lived together for close to fifty years, and he helped manage the illustrator’s career, a relationship that would have likely disappointed the Arrow man’s female fans. …
Leyendecker’s subjects exemplify an elite white masculinity that was hardly representative of the diversity of the United States in his time, or since. It was working in line with nationalist standards of rugged masculinity espoused from the top by figures like Teddy Roosevelt that permeated the culture at large…
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below); and at right, Ivory Soap It Floats (1900, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
A new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertisement campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period. Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI.
Born in 1874 in Montabaur, Germany, Leyendecker immigrated to Chicago in 1882 with his parents and three siblings. Showing an early artistic talent, Leyendecker and his youngest brother, F. X., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris where they developed their distinctive styles. Upon returning to the United States, the brothers entered a publishing renaissance and soon found themselves at its center, New York City. In 1914, they moved into a 14-room house in New Rochelle, New York, along with Charles Beach, for 48 years.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men with Golf Clubs Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, c. 1909 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
In Leyendecker’s illustrations, interactions between men often took place in homosocial spaces such as all-male dormitories, clubs, haberdasheries, and gymnasiums. In this example, the men’s informal dress and posture plus the heraldic marks of Harvard and Yale in the window suggest an elite college clubhouse and seem to target the ad to college men.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men and Woman, Arrow Shirts with Golf Clubs and Collie Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1910 Oil on board National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Leyendecker developed campaigns for Arrow collars depicting handsome, idealised men wearing shirts and detachable collars manufactured by Cluett Peabody & Co. These ads often depicted fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs. Even when women are present, the men depicted seem indifferent to them, often sharing sexually charged glances with each other instead.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Couple in Boat Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1912 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
The exhibition locates Leyendecker’s work within the evolution of commercial illustration, when advertisers sought to sell products by emotion and feeling, not only by factual representation of a product’s utilitarian characteristics. These commercial trends can be seen in Leyendecker’s advertising illustrations for Arrow collars.
A new exhibition examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period.
The exhibition showcases 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings and a wealth of related ephemera, and features both Leyendecker’s editorial work, such as magazine covers, as well as commercial illustrations that appeared in the pages of popular publications, on roadside billboards, in store windows, and on mass transit. Laying the groundwork of Leyendecker’s implied gay narratives, these ads starred fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs.
Under Cover delves into the early politics of sexual identity and gender while simultaneously examining how Leyendecker helped establish a nationalistic ideal of elite and athletic white male beauty. To address this aspect of his work, the exhibition juxtaposes some of Leyendecker’s paintings with artefacts that offer counter-narratives to his works’ exclusionary nature, including depictions of fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a selection of contemporaneous advertisements with homoerotic connotations and a digital show of images depicting gay culture in New York during Leyendecker’s time.
Under Cover is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. The show is guest-curated by Donald Albrecht, and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture.
Text from the New-York Historical Society website
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) In the Yale Boathouse 1905 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
This painting was one of seven by Leyendecker that illustrated Ralph D. Paine’s “A Victory Unforeseen,” published in the July 1905 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. The short story centres on a Yale-Harvard boat race, and in this image, the hero cools himself off by pouring a pail of water over his sweating shoulders.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at third right, Man and Woman Dancing (1923, below); at second right, Couple in Boat (1912, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left centre, Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below); at centre, In the Yale Boathouse (1905, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
“A Superb Example of the Common Man”
As a gay artist, Leyedecker demonstrated a marked flare for portraying the male body either semi-nude or wearing body-revealing clothing. As a specialist in images of men, Leyedecker painted a whole range of male types from the mass market – from feminised men, like those in interwoven sock ads who pose languidly while they look at and caress their stockings; to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man; to masculine icons such as the sailor, lifeguard, and athlete. Some of these types were consistent with the era’s theories linking race, gender, and bodily appearance. (Leyedecker’s attitudes toward these issues is unknown). His athletes embodied the tenets of muscular Christianity, and influential philosophy whose proponents believed in manly athleticism as a means toward a patriotic and moral good. President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the movement’s principles, noted that Leyendecker’s illustrations depicted “a superb example of the common man.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left in the bottom image, Cover of Saturday Evening Post (June 29, 1907, below) and Cover of Collier’s (June 24, 1916, below); at second right, In the Yale Boathouse (1905, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men reading Arrow Collar advertisement 1914 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left top, Men Reading (1914, above) and at left bottom, Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Homo-sociability
Many of Leyendecker’s paintings portray male behaviour as well as their social and physical interactions. In his illustrations, there interactions often take place in all-male queer spaces such as dormitories, clubs, haberdasheries and gyms. Leyendecker had access to these spaces, and as a gay man he might have been attuned to their potential for same-sex desire and connection. Often, when women are present in his work, the men seem indifferent to them, sometimes sharing sexually charged glances with each other instead.
Since Leyendecker operated within the collaborative nature of the modern advertising profession, he did not have control over what happened to his images after the created them. His work was often subject to revisions at the hands of art directors and others. These changes, whether intentional or not, sometimes had the effect of fortifying or mitigating the images implications of same-sex attraction.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left top, Men Reading (1914, above) and at left bottom, Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, above); at centre, The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt (1911, below); and at right, In the Stands 2 (1913, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt Arrow shirt advertisement, 1911 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) In the Stands 2 Arrow shirt advertisement, 1913 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation views of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society at left, The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt (1911, above); and at right, In the Stands 2 (1913, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Masculinity and Style
Leyendecker skilfully painted fashionable white men interaction with one another. His 1911 ad for Dorchester dress shirts depicts two men in evening clothes leaning slightly toward each other, possibly to share an intimate story. The whit man-about-town ideal in Leyendecker’s work was only one of many examples of masculinity that circulated in this period. Another kind was advanced by leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African American art and literature. They understood the power of visual representation and self-presentation to denigrate or uplift their race, especially in the eyes of white audiences. Black Harlem Renaissance writers and artists and their allies forged an elite cultural vanguard. They produced illustrated books, drawings, and photographs that conveyed nuanced and realistic images of Black masculinity through elegant dress and deportment. Queer Black men participated in and were represented by these efforts.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at second left, In the Stands 2 (1913, above); at centre, Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach (1918, below); at third right, Man and Woman with Spanish Shawl (1926); and at right, Couple in Boat (1912, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach 1918 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at centre, Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach (1918, below); at second right, The S.S. Leviathan (1918, below); and at right, Man and Woman with Spanish Shawl (1926) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) The S.S. Leviathan House of Kuppenheimer advertisement, 1918 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
New-York Historical Society Exhibition Explores the Work of J.C. Leyendecker, a Pivotal Gay Artist and Illustrator Who Helped Shape American Visual Culture.
This spring, a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period. Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity, on view May 5 – August 13, 2023, is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI.
“Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity deepens our understanding of the struggle for full civil rights as Americans of the LGBTQ+ community,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “The exhibition is part of New-York Historical’s ongoing commitment to tell stories of Americans whose lived experience, though important and consequential to our history, is so often absent from textbooks in schools and colleges. New-York Historical’s collaboration with the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which will be housed in our institution’s new wing, will further enable meaningful conversations about LGBTQ+ history and its rightful place within the American narrative.”
“J.C. Leyendecker was an amazingly talented artist whose illustrations have come to embody the look and feel of the first half of the century while simultaneously demonstrating how fluidity in gender expression and gay representation were actually quite common at the time, contrary to current assertions that they are unique to our own moment,” said Donald Albrecht, guest curator. “Not only did his work exemplify the zeitgeist, but it depicts a deeply nuanced view of sexuality and advertising that broadens our understanding of American culture.”
Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity showcases 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings and a wealth of related ephemera, and features both Leyendecker’s editorial work, such as magazine covers, as well as commercial illustrations that appeared in the pages of popular publications, on roadside billboards, in store windows, and on mass transit. His aesthetic influence extended to Norman Rockwell, his colleague and eventual successor as the Post’s premier illustrator. The exhibition is organised into two primary sections: one exploring Leyendecker’s depictions of the male body, either semi-nude or clad in body-revealing garments, and a second focusing on his images of male intimacies, often of men sharing sexually charged looks. The model for many of his illustrations was Charles Beach, his lover and eventual business manager.
Under Cover delves into the early politics of sexual identity and gender while simultaneously examining how Leyendecker helped establish a nationalistic ideal of elite and athletic white male beauty. To address this aspect of his work, the exhibition juxtaposes some of Leyendecker’s paintings with artefacts that offer counter-narratives to his works’ exclusionary nature, including depictions of fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance. Also providing crucial context: a selection of contemporaneous advertisements with homoerotic connotations and a digital show of images depicting gay culture in New York during Leyendecker’s time, including plays about lesbians and men in drag that appeared on Broadway, effeminate male nightclub performers, and gay artists who wrote poems and created drawings about same-sex desire.
The exhibition locates Leyendecker’s work within the evolution of commercial illustration, when advertisers sought to sell products by emotion and feeling and not only by factual representation of a product’s utilitarian characteristics. These commercial trends can be seen in Leyendecker’s work creating advertising illustrations for companies such as Gillette razors, Ivory soap, House of Kuppenheimer menswear, and Interwoven socks. He also developed campaigns for Arrow collars depicting handsome, idealised men wearing shirts and detachable collars manufactured by Cluett, Peabody & Co. Laying the groundwork of Leyendecker’s implied gay narratives, these ads starred fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs. In his work, Leyendecker created drawings depicting multiple kinds of masculinity for the mass market, from feminized men like the languidly posed males in Interwoven ads who look at and caress their sheer stockings to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man to manly men like muscular sailors, lifeguards, and athletes.
Leyendecker’s suggestive images aligned with his era’s sexual mores. Starting in the latter decades of the 19th century, small but dense subcultures that defied sexual and gender conventions became increasingly visible in cities like New York. Members of these subcultures often identified themselves with specific styles of dress, mannerisms, and language. As a gay Manhattanite immersed in the city’s sophisticated visual culture industries, Leyendecker was most likely cognisant of these gay identity markers, sometimes depicting them in his illustrations.
Under Cover is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. The show is guest-curated by Donald Albrecht, and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture. Drawing on three decades of scholarship, the exhibition is aided by a committee of advisors: Dr. Elspeth Brown, Professor of History at the University of Toronto; Dr. Monica L. Miller, Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College; and Dr. Michael Murphy, Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.
Press release from the New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Saturday Evening Post June 29, 1907 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Leyendecker’s Ivy League athletes embodied the ideals of muscular Christianity, a philosophy whose proponents believed in athleticism as a means toward a patriotic and moral good. President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the movement’s principles, noted that Leyendecker’s illustrations depicted “a superb example of the common man.”
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Collier’s June 24, 1916 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
As a gay male artist, Leyendecker demonstrated a marked flair for depicting the male body either semi-nude or wearing body-revealing clothing. In this cover, Leyendecker partially exposes the athlete’s left nipple.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Collier’s November 10, 1917 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
During World War I, Leyendecker adapted his flair for depicting men to produce images of sailors and soldiers endowed with a healthy, heroic, and muscular masculinity.
Robert Minor (American, 1884-1952) “Army Medical Examiner: ‘At last a perfect soldier!'” The Masses, July 1916 Reproduction The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries
Home-front depictions of World War I were not always as positive as those created by Leyendecker. Chronicling the war’s dehumanising and deathly toll, this illustration from the leftist magazine The Masses rendered the male body with biting satire.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
By using the same model (Charles Beach) for each figure in this painting, Leyendecker implied that the muscled swimmer and eel-attired collegian were the same person. Reinforcing this idea, the catalog copy assets that the company makes American clothes perfectly fitted to the athletic American man’s body.
Men’s clothing manufacturer B. Kuppenheimer was founded in Chicago in 1876 by Bernard Kuppenheimer, a German Jewish immigrant, along with his son Jonas Kuppenheimer and Samuel Nathan. It was one of many American men’s clothiers with German Jewish founders and/or owners. Subjected to anti-Semitic satire in print media, manufacturers like Kuppenheimer were anxious to project a brand identity though advertising that embraced white, Christian ideals like the college man in the Leyendecker illustration.
Wall text from the exhibition
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort Painting for Kuppenheimer advertisement, c. 1920 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
By pairing a muscled swimmer with a well-tailored collegian, both modelled by Charles A. Beach, this advertisement illustrated Kuppenheimer’s claim in the ad for “truly American clothes” designed “for the American figure” and expressing “the American personality.” Men’s clothing manufacturer B. Kuppenheimer was founded in Chicago in 1876 by Bernard Kuppenheimer, a German Jewish immigrant, along with his son Jonas and Samuel Nathan.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Man and Woman Dancing Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1923 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
This illustration features models Phyllis Frederic and Brian Donlevy, who launched his acting career in the early 1920s while posing for Leyendecker. Donlevy went on to perform in Broadway plays and silent films, eventually taking on major roles in Hollywood movies.
Paralleling Leyendecker’s idealised depictions of white men and often stereotypical images of Black ones, members of the Harlem Renaissance produced illustrated books, drawings, and photographs that conveyed positive images of Black masculinity through elegant dress and deportment. Taken by Carl Van Vechten, a gay white critic, novelist, and Renaissance promoter, this photograph of author and artist Richard Bruce Nugent signalled its subject’s gayness by including a bust of Antinous, the male lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1928 Oil on canvas Private collection Image courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Juxtaposing a modern muscular football player with a Pilgrim, Leyendecker’s painting for the 1928 Thanksgiving cover of the Saturday Evening Post positions the popular sport not only as a Thanksgiving pastime, but also as a cultural marker of American-ness. By the time the Post published this cover, football had been emerging for decades as an emblem of masculinity.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at right, Leyendecker’s Easter – Man in the Mirror Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 11, 1936 (below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Easter – Man in the Mirror Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 11, 1936 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
In his work, Leyendecker created drawings depicting multiple kinds of masculinity for the mass market, from preening, dandified men like this artwork’s subject to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man to manly men like muscular sailors, lifeguards, and athletes. Timed to Easter, this cover illustration was also one of many instances of the artist creating Post illustrations themed to the seasons and holidays.
New-York Historical Society 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street) New York, NY 10024 Phone: (212) 873-3400
Exhibition dates: 7th October, 2022 – 21st May, 2023
Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt
Wer’e here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere.
Despite years of persecution, death and inequality, the presence of queer identity, diversity and creativity remains undimmed.
There are some fabulous, groundbreaking human beings who are “being seen” in this posting. Equally, there are some fabulous art works that illuminate the(ir) human condition.
Let’s celebrate their existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
About the exhibition
TO BE SEEN is an exhibition devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism website
“When a right is withheld from you, you must fight and not give in; that is a moral duty.”
Joseph Schedel opened the first meeting of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee of Munich on September 24, 1902
Exterior view of the NS Documentation Center in Munich showing a work in the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 – Maximiliane Baumgartner’s “You look at us – we look at you”: Rubbing against the architecture of the executive gaze (Based on a paper by Anita Augspurg ‘Mißgriffe der Polizei’ / ‘Abuses by the Police’, 1902) 2021 Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
TO BE SEEN | Trailer
The exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 is dedicated to the stories of LGBTIQ* in Germany in the first half of the 20th century from October 7th, 2022 to May 21st, 2023 at the Munich Documentation Center. With historical testimonies and artistic positions from then to the present, the exhibition traces queer life plans and networks, freedom and persecution.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at diverse genders, bodies and identities. It shows how queer life became more and more visible in the 1920s and how role models and desires were dealt with more openly. Homosexual, trans* and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance: they organised themselves, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity and conquered their own spaces.
In addition to recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics and society, resistance also increased. After the National Socialists came to power, the LGBTIQ* subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945 their stories and fates were hardly archived or remembered.
Unknown photographer Lili, Paris 1926 From N. Hoyer (ed.). Man into Woman. An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). London: Jarrolds, 1933, 1926, opp. p. 40. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Lili Elbe, a transgender woman who underwent sex reassignment surgery in Berlin in the 1930s.
Around 1900, queer people in Germany began gaining more and more visibility in public life – in art, culture, science, and politics. Existing role models for men and women were being questioned. Homosexual women and men as well as trans* and non-binary people achieved initial successes in their struggle for equal rights and acceptance: they organised and fought for scientific and legal recognition of their sexual and gender identity.
They met in public places, founded clubs and associations, and started magazines. New terms were coined to describe their identities and create a sense of belonging. Urning, lesbian, girlfriend, Bubi, homosexual: more than a hundred years ago there were already many expressions for what we call queer today. But as their visibility grew, so did the social and political backlash. The Nazi takeover in 1933 was a defining moment for queer people – their subculture was largely destroyed. In the postwar years, discrimination continued.
Even decades later, LGBTQI+ history is still hardly remembered or preserved in archives. Through historical testimonies and artistic positions from then and now, TO BE SEEN traces queer lives and networks, the spaces of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+ people, and the persecution they suffered.
Police photo of Liddy Bacroff, taken after an arrest, 1933. Barcoff described themself as a “homosexual transvestite”, lived from sex work, and was convicted several times. In 1943, they was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Liddy Bacroff, a transgender woman initially from Ludwigshafen, who moved to Hamburg and lived for the majority of her life publicly presenting herself as a woman. She did not perceive herself to be a man (and, indeed, in papers she left after having been imprisoned, she determined what her name would be while also conspicuously referring to herself as “Liddy Bacroff, Transvestit”). But this was effectively her own form of self-ID. Certainly the authorities didn’t see her as such — her records remain filed under her deadname and identify her as a homosexual man – and, though she’d have been given a Transvestitenschein in Berlin, she wasn’t IN Berlin. Having not visited Hirschfeld and his Institut, it’s a marvel she uses the term “Transvestit”; elsewhere she does refer to herself as a “Mann-Weib” (a “male woman”), and frequently as a girl or a woman. The authorities, again, call her a man or, occasionally, a “Zwitter.” (NB. “Zwitter” means “hermaphrodite” and is here not meant literally but rather as an epithet recorded in the official files – an insult to her.) So the language that is used to describe trans people is inconsistent and, often, absent (depending on the sources). Reading between the lines is necessary, especially in the official records, which view trans women (regardless their lived circumstances or their appearance) only as homosexual men, and charge them as such. And while Hirschfeld was conscientious, the police were… not. This is especially true as the 1930s unfolded and the country Nazified. I wrote a very long thread a while back about “Heinrich Bode”, who was assigned male at birth but frequently presented as a woman. I used that thread to highlight difficulties of definition because Bode denounced their appearance as a woman in court filings and personal testimony, but at the same time also hinted that there was something much deeper than “just” dressing as a woman. But as they were subjected to prosecution by the Nazified judiciary and security state, they were under duress. So, do we assume that Bode was trans, and denied it because of the threat of punishment? Or was their presentation simply playing with the conventions of gender?
Dr. Bodie A. Ashton Historiker, Universität Erfurt. Text from his Twitter account
The androgynous dancer created new body images and developed the swapping of clothes into a stage genre of its own.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Queer
“Queer” originally referred to anything that did not fit into the usual categories. In English the word queer (meaning strange, other, suspicious), was used earlier as a derogative term for homosexuals. Since the 1990s, however, the term has been adopted by many non heterosexual and non-binary people as a positive self-designation. Within the exhibition, queer is used as a catch-all term for a variety of sexual and gender identities and practices that deviate from heterosexual ideas. The term primarily, but not only, refers to LGBTQI+ – in other words lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersexual persons. Furthermore, “queering” can be understood as a practice of combating various forms of discrimination and exclusion. Applied to gender, sexuality, and identity issues, it means casting a critical gaze at the worldview that regards a heterosexual relationship between two persons as the social norm. The rigid binary division of gender into man and woman and the associated role models are thrown into question. In the exhibition, historical self-designations are used where they can be traced through sources.
Self empowerment
In the German Empire, politics, the economy, and society were dominated by men. The gender order, which was maintained over centuries by state and church, was strictly divided into two parts: men and women were assigned clear roles within which they must operate. People who did not conform to these role models and lived gender and sexual identities outside the normative order were ostracised. They were considered immoral, criminal, or ill. According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code of 1871, sexual acts between men were forbidden and punishable by imprisonment. In Austria, sex between women was also punishable.
But there were individuals who rebelled against the prevailing gender order and fought for a more open society. They opposed the outlawing of homosexuality and transsexuality, advocated a change in criminal law, and assertively engaged in the recognition of their identities. New alliances and self-images emerged. Many of these pioneers paid a high price for their rebellion: they lost their jobs, their families, and their friendships, and were socially isolated.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we present individuals and movements who rebelled against the gender order that prevailed around 1900 and advocated a more open society. In their fight for equal rights and acceptance, they showed solidarity with each other, organised themselves in clubs, founded magazines, coined new terms and met in bars and clubs.
One of them was the chansonnière and cabaret artist Claire Waldoff (1884-1957). Born as Clara Wortmann in Gelsenkirchen, she is a central figure in the Berlin cultural scene of the 1920s. Her songs are known throughout Germany. She lives openly with her partner Olga (Olly) von Roeder and shapes the city’s lesbian scene.
Emil Orlik (European born Prague, 1870-1932)
Emil Orlik (21 July 1870 – 28 September 1932) was a painter, etcher and lithographer. He was born in Prague, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived and worked in Prague, Austria and Germany.
Emil Orlik was born the son of a tailor on July 21, 1870, in Prague, then the capital of a province within the Austro-Hungarian empire. He first studied art at the private art school of Heinrich Knirr, where one of his fellow pupils was Paul Klee. Other friends at this time included Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Starting in 1891, Orlik studied at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm Lindenschmit. He later learned engraving from Johann Leonhard Raab and proceeded to experiment with various printmaking processes, including woodcut, which he and his friend, Bernard Pankok, experimented with in 1896.
Orlik left the Academy in 1893. He performed his military service for a year before returning to Prague in 1894. He relocated to Munich in 1896, where he worked for the magazine Jugend (Youth). He spent most of 1898 travelling through Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, and Paris.
Emil Orlik’s prints and techniques went through extensive changes as he traveled internationally, learning new methods wherever he went. Known for his portraits of a wide variety of well-known individuals including Josephine Baker, Albert Einstein, and Marc Chagall, Orlik was an artistic chameleon, never sticking to one genre or style but studying many. His prints catalog his travels, creating a kind of pictorial diary of the years 1892 to 1900 in particular. Many of his works, often produced in color, appeared in the European periodical PAN, along with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Kathe Kollwitz, and Max Klinger.
Japanese art and culture fascinated Orlik. He was aware of the impact Japanese art was having on European art and decided to visit Japan. In 1900, he traveled to Japan and spent a year studying Japanese woodblock cutting and printing. His studies of the Japanese culture led him to the art of Utamaro and Hiroshige. Orlik studied the language before his departure and within four months of his arrival he was proficient enough in Japanese to converse with the artisans whose work he admired and under whom he studied.
Orlik never limited himself to popular subject matter. He studied any scene that inspired him, major events or everyday life. He produced fourteen lithographs of the trial of Arthur Schnitzler and his fellow actors; reenactment of the banned play, “Aus dem Reigin,” for which Orlik was a defence witness. After the trial, Orlik began working for the theatre as a designer of costumes, stage sets, and posters.
He kept all his early woodblocks and, in 1920, he published his celebrated portfolio Kleine Holzschnitte (Small woodcuts) in an edition of 100, which also contained the text of his descriptions of each of the prints. The portfolio contained thirty-four woodcuts, eighteen of which were printed in colours. The complete portfolio is now very rarely found. It included such delightful items as Aus London and the superb colour woodcut Schneiderwerkstatt bei Orlik in Prag (the Orlik tailoring workshop in Prague), which depicts his father and colleague’s busy sewing.
Orlik was also commissioned to design colour posters for the Best-Litovsk Peace Conference at which Russia and Germany ended their conflict. He produced seventy-two lithographs, including a number portraits of Leon Trotsky. Around this time he also began to study photography, and by the mid-1920s was photographing celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Albert Eintstein.
Emil Orlik died of a heart attack on September 28, 1932. His brother Hugo was willed the estate, and with it the numerous works of art Orlik had collected throughout the years. Hugo Orlik and his family perished in WWII at the hands of the Nazis, and the only survivor was an aunt who regained what little was left of Emil’s effects. To this day Orlik’s work is still exhibited throughout the world.
Anonymous. “Emil Orlik Biography” on The Annex Galleries website Nd [Online] Cited 17/04/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation views of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Bars and clubs, magazines, organisations, private or public places: queer subcultures and networks emerged in Germany beginning at the turn of the century and especially in the 1920s. Political goals were formulated together. People communicated using their own codes, ciphers, and symbols.
The public sphere continued to be reserved primarily for men – heterosexual, white, and Christian men. But the experience of conquering one’s own spaces against all social opposition, of joining forces and stepping into the public sphere together, led to a growing self-confidence in the queer scenes. In the process, they not only fought for their own interests; political bonds were forged and coalitions formed that bridged differences.
Visions for a society with equal rights for all people were drafted, and existing structures of power were questioned. But internal conflicts emerged as well, and not all queer groups pulled together.
§ 175 des Reichsstrafgesetzbuchs
Trancript: “Paragraph 175: Perverse fornication committed between persons of the male sex or by persons with animals is punishable by imprisonment; loss of civil rights may also be imposed.”
According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code, sexual intercourse between men was punishable. This provision originated in the Prussian Criminal Code and was introduced throughout Germany with the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Prior to this, homosexuality was exempt from punishment in some German states, such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, following the example of France. The paragraph was controversial from the beginning: ecclesiastical conservatives and extreme right-wing parties demanded it be made more severe; liberals, social democrats, and communists called for its abolition.
Organisations and the conquest of public space
At the end of the nineteenth century, gay men joined forces to fight against persecution based on Paragraph 175. They founded clubs and associations and sought supporters to achieve their vision of a more open society. Berlin became the hub of this movement and developed into a leading centre of attraction for queer people. It was in Berlin that, in 1897, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded, which aimed to achieve legal and social equality for homosexual and trans* people.
Some activists from the women’s movements joined this struggle, especially when the extension of Paragraph 175 to encompass women was debated in 1909. Their goal was far-reaching sexual and social reform: a woman’s right to sexual self-determination, abortion, extramarital relations, and independence from her husband. Some leading women’s rights activists lived with another woman, but only few openly identified as lesbian.
Queer subcultures flourished in the Weimar Republic. A diverse landscape of organisations emerged that represented the interests of gays, lesbians, and trans* persons. However, the struggle against Paragraph 175 was not always synonymous with advocacy for an open society. Among gay activists there were also those who paid homage to a homoerotic male cult. They excluded – in addition to women – all those who did not conform to their heroic, in some cases also racist ideas of masculinity.
Adolf Brand (publisher) Der Eigene (The Unique) 1926
Founded in 1896 by Adolf Brand, “Der Eigene” was the longest-running homosexual journal. With its literary-artistic contributions it evoked the image of heroic masculinity.
Struggle against Paragraph 175: the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
The physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) came from a liberal Jewish family and began actively campaigning for the abolition of Paragraph 175 at the end of the nineteenth century. His actions were motivated by the persecution to which gay men were subjected. As a sexual reformer and founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he fought against the prevailing rigid sexual morality and contributed significantly to the visibility of queer people.
Magnus Hirschfeld utilised modern means in his educational activities. The silent film drama was shot in 1919 with his active participation. It is considered the first film to deal openly with Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) the subject of homosexuality. Heavily attacked by conservative and right-wing extremists, and by some with anti-Semitic motives, the film was used as an opportunity to curtail the artistic freedom introduced after the 1918 revolution. After being screened publicly for a full year, the film was banned by censors in 1920 and almost all copies were destroyed.
“Anders als die Andern” is about a homosexual musician who is subject to blackmail. When he no longer knows what to do and files charges, not only is the blackmailer convicted, but he himself is also sentenced – for violating Paragraph 175. He is shattered by the verdict and takes his own life.
Excerpts from Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern) (Germany, 1919), which was preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. Funding provided by The Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation and the members of Outfest.
Synopsis
The concert violinist Paul Koerner takes a student under his wing, much to the worry of the boy’s parents. Koerner is meanwhile being blackmailed by a former lover, since in Germany any homosexual relations at that time were punishable under the law, codified in Article 175, which was not removed from the books until the 1960s. The German film, Different From the Others is, as far as we know, the first fiction feature film to address a specifically gay audience. Fortunately, even though more than 90% of all German silent films have disappeared, this film exists today in at least half its original length. When the film was first shown in 1919, gay and lesbian audiences must have been amazed that a mainstream fiction feature film would portray their situation as a fact of nature, rather than a perversion. Today, this film celebrates the brief opening of that door, before it slammed shut for another 50 years.
The film was produced and directed by Richard Oswald, at that time one of Germany’s most prolific independents, who made films cheaply and premiered them in a Berlin cinema he owned, where his wife would often handle the office box. Oswald had earned a fortune in 1917 / 1918 with a number of “educational” feature films about sexually transmitted diseases, which were approved by the censorship authorities, simply because syphilis was rampant in the trenches. Oswald would continue to produce controversial films, like his acknowledged masterpiece, The Captain from Koepenick (1931) based on Carl Zuckmayer’s anti-authoritarian play. The Nazis never forgave Oswald for Anders als die Andern or Koepenick, forcing Oswald into exile and eventually to Hollywood, where he directed several films and televisions shows. Although long under appreciated in Germany, recent critical reappraisals have valued his in-your-face aesthetic and modern subject matter.
Only a severely truncated version of the film has survived, with Ukrainian titles, as Gosfilmofond in Russia. It was restored previously to a semblance of the original 1919 release by the Munich Film Museum. The UCLA restoration is based on that Munich reconstruction, with some changes and additions made.
Credits
Richard-Oswald-Produktion. Screenwriters: Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Cinematographer: Max Fassbender. With: Conrad Veidt, Leo Connard, Ilse von Tasso-Lind, Alexandra Willegh, Ernst Pittschau, Fritz Schulz.
Different From Others: A Legacy Preserved (2012)
Featurette about the restoration of German silent film Different From Others (1919). Produced for the Outfest Legacy Project and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
On October 6 the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 opens at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. TO BE SEEN is devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Participating artists
Katharina Aigner, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Claude Cahun, Zackary Drucker & Marval Rex, Nicholas Grafia, Philipp Gufler, Richard Grune, Lena Rosa Händle, Hannah Höch, Paul Hoecker, Nina Jirsíková, Germaine Krull, Elisar von Kupffer, Zoltán Lesi & Ricardo Portilho, Herbert List, Heinz Loew, Jeanne Mammen, Michaela Melián, Henrik Olesen, Emil Orlik, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Jonathan Penca, Lil Picard, Karol Radziszewski, Alexander Sacharoff, Gertrude Sandmann, Christian Schad, Renée Sintenis, Mikołaj Sobczak, Wolfgang Tillmans and others.
TO BE SEEN will be accompanied by an extensive program of events and outreach on topics such as the persecution of LGBTQI+ persons under National Socialism, the queer history of Munich, intersectionality and drag, as well as queer identity in literature and film. All information and updates can be found at nsdoku.de/tobeseen.
The accompanying publication features a collection of texts and artworks from the exhibition as well as essays by key voices that shed light on past and present queer lives from an academic and social perspective. The book in German and English will be published in December 2022 by Hirmer Verlag. It features contributions by, among others, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Michaela Dudley, Sander L. Gilman, Dagmar Herzog, Ulrike Klöppel, Ben Miller, Cara Schweitzer, Sebastien Tremblay.
TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 takes place under the patronage of Claudia Roth, Minister of State for Culture and Media. The exhibition was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Director: Mirjam Zadoff Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt Project Management: Karolina Kühn, Anna Straetmans, Sebastian Huber
Press release from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
In April 1933, the film “The Mystery of the Gender” ran in Viennese cinemas for about two weeks before it was banned. The film is a mixture of romance and medical educational film, including close-ups of the women’s genitals. Among the protagonists are – without mentioning their names – Toni Ebel, Charlotte Charlaque and Dora Richter. You can find an excerpt of the film in our storytelling http://www.tobeseen.nsdoku.de
Toni Ebel converted to Judaism in early 1933, but reversed the conversion as the pressure of persecution increased. After 1945 she was recognised in the GDR as a victim of fascism. Ebel was able to start a new life as a painter.
Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel remained in correspondence after their forced separation in 1942. In 1946 Charlaque told her friend about her loneliness, her arrival as a refugee in New York and the difficulties in getting her female name recognised.
Dora Richter became known as one of the first trans* women to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Since it was difficult for trans* people to find work, she took a job as a housemaid at the Institute for Sexology, which was looted by National Socialist groups in 1933. Nothing is known of Richter’s fate after 1933.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at rear, an enlargement of an image by an unknown photographer of the Eldorado in the Motzstrasse (1932, below); and at left centre in the display cabinet, an image by an unknown photographer Trans* people in the Eldorado in Berlin (1926, above) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The Eldorado on Lutherstraße was one of the city’s infamous cabaret bars.
The Eldorado was the name of multiple nightclubs and performance venues in Berlin before the Nazi Era and World War II. The name of the cabaret Eldorado has become an integral part of the popular iconography of what has come to be seen as the culture of the period in German history often referred to as the “Weimar Republic”. …
Eldorado was a gay cabaret in that along with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans* patrons, a heterosexual-identifying audience (artists, authors, celebrities, tourists) would have been present as well. “Cross-dressing” was tolerated on the premises, though for the most part legally prohibited and / or sharply regulated in public (and to an extent in private) at the time. This exception to everyday life attracted not only male patrons who wished to dress in the “clothing of the opposite sex”, and their admirers, but also to no small extent women who wished to do the same, and their admirers. Wealthy lookers-on were encouraged to come and drink and watch as so-called “Zechenmacher” (tab payers). The practice was particularly common in so-called “Lesbian bars” or at so-called “Lesbian balls” in the neighbourhood at the time and up the 1960s in places like the Nationalhof at nearby Bülowstraße 37. As women’s incomes were on average much lower than men’s then as now, male spectators with money to spend were explicitly welcome, and it was not uncommon that there were sex-workers present to offer their services. Eldorado also included what have come to be called drag shows as a regular part of the cabaret performances.
The Eldorado, which opened in 1926 on Lutherstrasse in Berlin-Schoeneberg, was – along with its counterpart, the “new Eldorado” on Motzstrasse – one of the internationally most well-known trendy bars of its time. Magnus Hirschfeld, Claire Waldoff, Anita Berber and Marlene Dietrich often and happily visited the Eldorado, as did the prominent National Socialist Ernst Röhm. With its shows, it attracted a wealthy audience, which soon consisted not only of homosexuals and trans* people, but above all of onlookers heterosexuals. Guests could purchase tokens that could be exchanged for a dance with the Eldorado’s “transvestite” staff.
A popular accessory for lesbian women in the 1920s was the “dance monocle”
Short hair, ties, tails, and top hats were other identifying marks within part of the lesbian scene – and soon to be common among modern heterosexual women as well. The “New Woman” of the 1920s broke away from traditional gender images and appropriated new things and spaces that had previously been occupied by men.
In the Berlin scene, but also in other cities, numerous gay and lesbian clubs that rented premises, called for social activities, but also explicitly pursued political and emancipatory goals. One of the largest “women’s clubs” was the Violetta Ladies’ Club, founded in Berlin in 1926.
The founder of the women’s club Violetta was the lesbian activist Lotte Hahm (1890-1967), who also wrote for “The Girlfriend”. Together with her Jewish partner Käthe Fleischmann (1899-1967) she ran the lesbian bar Monokel-Diele in Berlin. After 1933, both initially tried to maintain lesbian networks and meeting places under cover names. Fleischmann, persecuted as a Jew, survived the Nazi era in various hiding places.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
A lively scene for homosexuals and trans* persons emerged in Germany during the 1920s. Especially in major cities, a number of clubhouses, bars, and clubs functioned as meeting places. The undisputed centre of queer life was Berlin. Police authorities there followed a more liberal course than elsewhere after the end of the nineteenth century. Nearly two hundred subcultural venues are documented in the imperial capital between 1919 and 1933, about eighty of them for lesbian women.
In conservative Munich, as in smaller cities and rural areas, fewer venues existed. Homosexual men had to resort to informal meeting places, due to the ongoing criminal persecution. They used public parks and toilets as “pick-up spots” to socialise or have sex. In doing so, they always ran the risk of being denounced or stopped by the police.
Magazines and informal networks
Magazines were an important means of communication for queer subcultures. They listed relevant clubs and bars, bookstores, and associations, and served as contact exchanges. These references and opportunities were essential particularly for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks. However, the publishers had to reckon with the banning of their print products at any time. It was not uncommon for entire print runs or volumes to be labeled as “trash texts” and confiscated.
In order to avoid police persecution and social exclusion, the scene employed its own linguistic codes. Camouflage terms such as “friend”, “girlfriend”, “ideal friendship”, “friendly exchange of ideas”, or “ideal-minded” were used to refer to lesbian and gay connections. Lonely hearts ads in relevant magazines were often the only way to find like-minded people, especially in smaller towns and in the countryside.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing historical magazines
In TO BE SEEN you can leaf through historical magazines. They were an important means of communication for queer subcultures.
Magazines such as “Die Freundsblatt”, “DasFreundschaftsblatt” or “Frauenliebe” referred to relevant pubs, bookstores and associations and served as contact exchanges. Especially for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks, these tips and opportunities were essential. However, the publishers had to expect their printed products to be banned at any time. It is not uncommon for entire editions or volumes to be marked as “trash and dirty writing” and confiscated.
“The Girlfriend” (subtitle “The Ideal Friendship Journal”, later “Weekly Journal for Ideal Female Friendship”) was a magazine for lesbian women from 1924 to 1933 in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is considered the first lesbian magazine and was first published monthly, then every two weeks, and later even weekly.
The editor was Friedrich Radzuweit (1876-1932), chairman of the Federation for Human Rights. The content focuses on information on lesbian life and meeting places for lesbians, political topics, short stories, serialised novels and classifieds. Although “The Girlfriend” was primarily aimed at a lesbian readership, there are also numerous articles that deal with topics such as ‘transvestism’ or transgender. It was discontinued a few weeks after the National Socialists seized power in January 1933: the last issue appeared on March 15, 1933, a week before the Enabling Act was passed.
Covers from Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), September 1932, and Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), 1929
The “Zwischenstufenwand” (sexual transitions wall) in the Institute for Sexology illustrated Hirschfeld’s theory that all people have male and female qualities in them.
The famous picture wall, illustrating Hirschfeld’s sex and gender theories. It was first exhibited in Leipzig (1922) on occasion of the German Natural Scientists’ and Physicians’ centenary and then in Vienna (1930) at the World League for Sexual Reform’s congress. The picture wall (2×1 m by 4×5 m) always had a prominent place in the Institute and was used to explain sexual theories to visitors.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Knowledge, diagnosis, control
Scientific interest in sexuality and gender was expanding around the turn of the century. The amount of sexological research and number of publications increased. Most writings described homosexuality or trans* identities as “pathological” conditions. This assumption has since been scientifically refuted. At the same time, groundbreaking theories emerged, for example Magnus Hirschfeld’s model of “sexual intermediates.” In it, the sexologist anticipated the later realisation that numerous other gender identities besides man and woman exist.
Yet, then as now, knowledge also meant power and control. People were examined, described, classified, and judged as patients. Some sexologists incorporated ideas in their research that drew on biologism and eugenics. These were spread throughout society and later played a central role for the Nazis: their conception of so-called “racial hygiene” distinguished between “valuable” and “unworthy” life.
The driving forces in the German-speaking world from the 1860s on were the lawyer and physician Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Ulrichs in particular fought for the decriminalisation and recognition of homosexuality. His insights into the diversity of sexuality and gender are still essential today. Other scientists understood the “third sex” as a pathological phenomenon and wanted to effect the “re-education” and “healing” of their patients with methods that were sometimes questionable. The result was often physical or psychological trauma.
The Institute for Sexology and its patients
Magnus Hirschfeld was the best-known representative of sexology in the German-speaking world. He combined a pursuit for emancipation and a scientific perspective, was a champion of decriminalisation and a physician at the same time. His Institute for Sexology, founded in Berlin in 1919, became the centre of the liberal-leftist sexual reform movement of the Weimar Republic. In addition to research and medical consulting, the institute operated a library, an archive, and a museum. Unlike conservative sexologists, Hirschfeld and his staff worked towards the self-acceptance of homosexuals and trans* persons.
This “adaptation therapy” or “milieu therapy” aimed to help people adapt to the queer milieu that suited them, instead of repressing their identity. Many important people from the gay community, such as Lili Elbe, were treated here. Homosexual writers such as André Gide and Christopher Isherwood visited the institute. People who today would be considered intersex were also counselled. From the beginning, the Nazis were disturbed by liberal sexology, Hirschfeld, and his institute. Many of the institute’s employees were, like Hirschfeld himself, Jewish. In 1933, Nazi students and SA members demolished the institute; Hirschfeld was on a world tour at the time and remained in exile in France.
The institute grew to become a refuge for “transvestites”. This is how people who we understand today as trans* persons were called at the time. Some of them lived in the institute and earned their living there. They were particularly dependent on it. Despite the institute’s great merits, the relationship between doctors and “patients” was not unproblematic from today’s point of view.
By mediating between queer people and state power, Hirschfeld and his colleagues were able to protect their patients and fight for more rights and freedom for them. But in order to do so, they cooperated with the police and the courts, thus providing the state institutions with access and control. Then as now, intersex and trans* people were rarely perceived as experts on themselves, making them dependent on the recognition bestowed by medicine and the justice system. This was accompanied by a scientific and state-regulatory view of their bodies that pushed them into the role of patients, externally controlled subjects, instead of granting them autonomy over their bodies as well as their own voice.
Hirschfeld’s medical practices are controversial today
However, Magnus Hirschfeld also referred those male homosexuals who, based on his biological research, assumed that homosexuality could also be treated, to other doctors. They castrated the patients and implanted heterosexual testicles in them.
Not only Magnus Hirschfeld’s medical practices, but also his scientific approach is controversial today. His absolute belief in biology leaned towards social Darwinism and eugenics. He founded a “Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics”. He thus promoted “sexual selection” in order to improve the “mental fitness of the offspring”. He was thus at the same time far away and entirely in line with the National Socialists.
The National Socialists saw Hirschfeld as a security risk, a threat to the population growth of the “Aryan race” and not only in him. Tens of thousands of gay men are sentenced to prison, jail, and concentration camps, the gay civil rights movement is crushed, gay hangouts are closed, magazines are banned, and then, on May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sex Research is looted and its library burned.
Gabi Schlag and Benno Wenz. “Magnus Hirschfeld – pioneer of sex research,” on the SWR website 29.7.2021 [Online] Cited 12/04/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Session of the “International Conference for Sex Reform on a Sexological Basis”, organised by Hirschfeld 1921 in Berlin at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. (Hirschfeld, leaning forward, is seated just beneath the lectern.) This was the first sexological congress held anywhere, and it laid the groundwork for the Copenhagen congress of 1928.
Titled “Transvestites in Front of the Institute of Sexology” this photograph was taken on the occasion of the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexology in Berlin, 1921.
Willy Römer (December 31 , 1887 in Berlin – October 26, 1979 in West Berlin ) was a press photographer. His picture agency was one of the ten most important of the Weimar period. The pictures mainly illustrate life in Berlin from 1905 to 1935. It is thanks to a rare stroke of luck that his extensive picture archive survived the Second World War almost unscathed.
Starting in 1900, “Transvestite Certificates” were issued by a doctor, that officially certified that a person was known to be “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we also show Gerd Katter’s “Transvestite License”. From 1900, “transvestite certificates” were issued in some cities. It is a medically certified official confirmation that a person is known as “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”. The authorities refrain from making an arrest if you show them during checks. However, those affected are thus registered with the police and can be monitored more easily.
Gerd Katter (1910-1995) came to the Institute for Sexology at the age of 16 – at that time still with a female birth name. Barred from having his breasts amputated because of his youth, Katter tries to operate on himself, which requires an emergency amputation. Katter is one of many people who receive concrete, albeit unconventional, help at the institute. So he is prescribed to visit bars where “transvestites” meet. According to the adaptation therapy pursued at the institute, those seeking advice should be brought into contact with like-minded people. This is how they should learn to accept themselves.
Magnus Hirschfeld repeatedly invited Gerd Katter to the institute to show his guests a medical case study – a practice of displaying people and their bodies that was common at the time, but which is problematic from today’s medical-ethical point of view. Gerd Katter later completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and lived in the GDR.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Female homosexuality and bisexuality received little attention in the male-dominated field of sexology. An exception was the research of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986). The physician situated precisely these topics at the centre of her work. After 1933, left-wing, Jewish, and openly lesbian women in Germany were increasingly targeted by the Nazis. Being Jewish, she emigrated to Paris in 1933, and to London in 1936. Her research on lesbian sexuality and bisexuality earned her international recognition beginning in the 1960s.
Feeling Bodies, Seeing Images
At the same time as the advancements in sexology, new notions of the body, gender, and intimacy were finding expression in art and culture. Literature, theatre, film, and the visual arts offered an opportunity to question gender stereotypes and to create new roles and body images. These served as the basis for imagining freer ways of living and to lay the foundation for what we perceive today as queer aesthetics.
While Article 142 of the Weimar Constitution promised extensive artistic freedom, censorship was simultaneously introduced for the new medium of film. Munich in particular had numerous bans on film and theatre performances deemed offensive.
In the first half of the twentieth century, artists experimented with new representations of the human body. They conceived of a wide spectrum of possible identities and sexualities situated outside the dominant categories. Artists subverted binary notions of gender, whether through ambiguities, gender-neutral codes, or playing with androgynous body images.
In 1933, the Nazis put an end to this diversity. Avant-garde works by artists such as Hannah Höch or Jeanne Mammen were denounced as “degenerate” and confiscated, banned, or destroyed. The regime instead honoured artists such as Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl, and Josef Thorak, who immortalised traditional gender images in monumental depictions. Such images supported the Nazi regime’s racial ideals, and endured well into the postwar period.
Hannah Höch worked with clichés and role models in her art and was a significant influence on the Dada movement.
Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1878)
Hannah Höch (German: [hœç]; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.
Höch’s work was intended to dismantle the fable and dichotomy that existed in the concept of the “New Woman”: an energetic, professional, and androgynous woman, who is ready to take her place as man’s equal. Her interest in the topic was in how the dichotomy was structured, as well as in who structures social roles.
Other key themes in Höch’s works were androgyny, political discourse, and shifting gender roles. These themes all interacted to create a feminist discourse surrounding Höch’s works, which encouraged the liberation and agency of women during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and continuing through to today.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Lovers
The works gathered here show homosexual couples and their intimate relationship with each other. At a time when gay and lesbian love could almost solely take place in secret, capturing queer intimacy within art became a political statement. The images represent an act of self-assertion within a discriminatory environment. They propose utopias and alternative realities that make togetherness possible – partly with recourse to antiquity, partly with a visionary view of future forms of loving and being.
Gertrude Sandmann (16 November 1893 – 6 January 1981) was a German artist and Holocaust survivor. Born into a wealthy German-Jewish family, Sandmann studied at the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen and had private tutelage from Käthe Kollwitz. In 1935 she was banned from practicing her profession due to the Nuremberg Laws. Given a deportation order in 1942, she ignored it, faked her own suicide, and hid with friends in Berlin until the end of the war. She lived in an apartment in Berlin-Schöneberg until the end of her life. She was a lesbian and, after the war, worked to improve the rights and visibility of LGBT people. Much of her oeuvre is held by the Potsdam Museum.
Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), who trained in Berlin and Munich, took private lessons from Käthe Kollwitz in the 1920s. She and the older artist remained lifelong friends. Unlike Kollwitz, however, Sandmann was less focused on social critique. A committed feminist, women were her favourite theme, as they were for her colleague Jeanne Mammen, who was about the same age.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at centre, Dora Kallmus’ photograph The trapeze artist Barbette (Nd, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The stage as site of utopias
In the Weimar Republic, vaudevilles, theatres, and nightclubs emerged in many major cities, on whose stages a freer treatment of sexuality and gender identities was allowed. Stage celebrities became role models for alternative gender roles, with drag performances developing into a genre in its own right.
The 1920s, often referred to as “golden” years, were by no means characterised by prosperity for most citizens, even though more and more people gained access to entertainment culture. War trauma and economic hardship stimulated the need to escape the worries of everyday life.
For many people, the bars and clubs of this period were places where they came into contact with alternative gender images and homosexuality, as well as where social debates were sparked.
The trapeze artist Barbette (real name Vander Clyde, 1899-1973) celebrated great success in Europe from the mid-1920s. Barbette performed, among other things, in the Berlin Varieté Wintergarten. The sensational productions of the “female impersonators” became increasingly known to a mass audience – and thus also helped the male and female impersonators of the Berlin scene to gain acceptance.
Dora Philippine Kallmus (Madame D’Ora) (Austrian, 1881-1963)
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
Early life
Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career.
She and her sister, Anna, were both “well-educated,” spoke English and French, and played the piano. They had also traveled throughout Europe.
She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.
Career
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. The Karlsbad gallery allowed D’Ora to cater to the “international elite vacationers.” These same clients later convinced her to open her Paris studio.
Between 1917 and 1927, D’Ora’s studio “produced” photographs for Ludwig Zwieback & Bruder, a Viennese department store. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Unknown photographer Dance study of Alexander Sakharoff 1912 Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration: illustr. Monatshefte für moderne Malerei, Plastik, Architektur, Wohnungskunst u. künstlerisches Frauen-Arbeiten – 30.1912
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Life under dictatorship
After the Nazis took power in 1933, every form of queer life was threatened and continued to exist only in private spaces or secret locations. Hopes for a tacit tolerance of homosexuality by the Nazis were finally dashed after the murder of Ernst Röhm, chief of- staff of the SA (Storm Troopers). The period of open persecution had begun.
During the first major Nazi raids against homosexuals on October 20, 1934, 145 men were arrested in Munich alone. Paragraph 175 of the penal code was made more severe in June 1935: any act between men bearing sexual suggestion was now punishable.
About 57,000 homosexual men were sentenced to prison, and between 6,000 and 10,000 of them were deported to concentration camps, of whom at least half were murdered.
Female homosexuality was not prosecuted in the dictatorship, but was socially ostracised. If lesbian women and persons who did not conform to their gender were denounced, they were threatened with police investigations, house searches, and interrogations. If political opposition, social deviance, or racial persecution additionally occurred, they faced repression or even internment in a concentration camp.
The graphic artist Richard Grune (1903-1983) was imprisoned almost continuously from 1934 to 1945 because of his homosexuality. After his liberation from the concentration camp, he processed what he had experienced through art.
“Solidarity,” a lithograph of one prisoner supporting another, by German artist Richard Grune, who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps after being convicted for homosexuality.
Trained as an artist and graphic designer, 29-year-old Richard Grune moved to Berlin the same month that the police began forcing these establishments to shut down. Although prominent nightclubs like the Eldorado faced closure, members of these communities still found ways to continue gathering more privately. For example, Grune hosted two parties for friends in his studio in fall 1934. He was denounced afterward – along with dozens of others – by a private citizen who often passed information to police. Grune was then arrested for alleged violations of Paragraph 175, the statute of the German criminal code that criminalised sexual relations between men. He was imprisoned for several months before being convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.
After serving his sentence, Grune was arrested again by the Gestapo and held indefinitely in what was misleadingly referred to as “protective custody” (“Schutzhaft”) – an experience shared by many convicted of violating Paragraph 175 under the Nazi regime.5 Grune spent the next decade in concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. He escaped from Flossenbürg in April 1945 as American forces approached and camp authorities evacuated the prisoners.
Grune created the featured lithograph6 – “Solidarity: Prisoner Supports His Exhausted Comrade” – in 1945 as part of a series of images inspired by his experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi camp system. These lithographs were reproduced in two published portfolios in 1947.7 Grune’s artwork reflects many of his own experiences, but it does not reference his persecution as a gay man in any specific way. Instead, his lithographs seem to suggest the idea of shared suffering among all concentration camp prisoners. Because sexual relations between men remained criminalised for decades in Germany after the end of World War II, many people convicted under Paragraph 175 chose to conceal the details of their past persecution under the Nazi regime.8
After the war, Grune chose to portray himself as a political prisoner of Nazism, but he was not able to obtain official recognition or compensation for his suffering. Although his lithographs are among the most important artistic representations of concentration camp experiences created immediately after the war, Grune could not support himself as an artist. He did occasionally find design and illustration work, but he made his living by working as a bricklayer. Grune died in obscurity in Kiel, Germany in 1983.
Anonymous. “Lithograph by Richard Grune,” on the Holocaust Sources in Context website Nd [Online] Cited 10/04/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
“This is how the Führer cleaned up!” Front page of the extra issue of the Völkischer Beobachter, June 30, 1934, Berlin edition Public domain
Homosexuality in Nazi organisations and in the military
The proscription of homosexuality was used by various sides in the political struggle. In 1931 / 1932, the Social Democrats utilised Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality to harm the Nazi Party. The Röhm case served the notion of “gay Nazis” gathering together in male associations, a phenomenon that did exist. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime increasingly cracked down on homosexual activity in the army, police, and Nazi associations. Intimacy between men was now punished particularly severely in party organisations and the police. Nazi propaganda labeled homosexual men as “enemies of the state” to legitimise this persecution. Nevertheless, clandestine homosexual encounters continued to occur.
Adapting to survive
After the dismantling of gay and lesbian subcultures across the entire state and the harshening of criminal law, homosexual contact took place almost exclusively in private spaces. Fear of denunciation and persecution drove most homosexuals to hide their sexuality and conform.
This also applied to lesbian women and trans* persons, who were not prosecuted per se. They could remain unhampered as long as they did not attract attention. Marriages of convenience were one of many survival strategies. Certain prominent artists were tolerated by the Nazi regime despite their widely known homosexuality. The regime, which needed these stars for its propaganda, held off on persecution, and demanded that they conform in their way of living.
Persecution and imprisonment
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
Part of the diary entry by Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust on the deportation of her Jewish partner Felice Schragenheim to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, August 21, 1944
Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust (1913-2006) and Felice Schragenheim (1922-1945) met in Berlin in 1942, shortly after Schragenheim went into hiding as a Jew. They moved in together a little later and promised to marry in June 1944. On August 21, 1944, Felice Schragenheim was discovered and taken to a Berlin collection point for Jews. Lilly Wust visited her there several times before the deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the hope of being able to help her beloved, Lilly Wust travelled to Theresienstadt herself in the fall of 1944.
Felice was deported to Auschwitz a little later. She died in early 1945, probably in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lilly Wust searched for her for years.
The love story of Lily Wust and Felice Schragenheim gained notoriety in the 1990s through the book “Aimée & Jaguar” and the feature film of the same name. However, there is another version of the story: Elenai Predski-Kramer, a former girlfriend of Felice Schragenheim, tells her perspective on the love story after the book was published and expresses the suspicion that Lilly Wust herself might have betrayed Felice Schragenheim. However, there is no evidence for this.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Only a few homosexual and trans* people succeeded in escaping Nazi persecution through emigration. This option was usually only open to the wealthy or those who had international contacts and could find work abroad thanks to their education and language skills. Leaving Nazi Germany was made more difficult by the measures against capital transfer, which were tightened in 1934. The “Reich Flight Tax” reduced assets by 25 percent upon departure, the export of foreign currency was prohibited, and the transfer of bank or securities assets was made almost impossible.
Individual homosexual or transgender people decided to actively resist the Nazi regime, also in the territories occupied by Germany. They documented the crimes of the Nazi regime, called for resistance, carried out sabotage, committed attacks, or fought as partisans or members of foreign troops against Hitler’s Germany.
Jewish-French author and photographer Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and her partner Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) put up resistance against the Nazi regime.
After four years of subversive activity, the pair were arrested by the Germans in 1944. Initially, the Nazi authorities couldn’t believe that the women carried it out by themselves. “They believed that there must be somebody else involved, there must be a man involved,” says Downie.
While waiting to be questioned, Cahun and Moore attempted suicide. They both took pills – barbiturates – which put them into a coma. Once they were well enough, they were sentenced to death for undermining the German forces. But the Bailiff of Jersey and the French Consul pleaded on their behalf – by that time, the Normandy landings had happened and Saint-Malo (the main connecting port) had been liberated, so they could no longer be deported to camps in Europe – and their sentence was commuted.
Although their lives had been saved, Moore and Cahun were not pleased. “They wanted to be martyrs for their cause,” says Downie. “To them, that would’ve been the realisation of their life of resistance, to be a martyr for freedom.”
At 3.40pm on May 9, 1945, the swastika was lowered from Fort Regent, a 19th-century fortification in St Helier, and the Union Jack was hoisted, signalling the official end of the occupation. Then the celebrations began. Cahun joined the crowds in Royal Square cheering, flag-waving, and holding a sailor aloft. Despite ill health from their time in prison, they kept on creating work after the war. In the same month, a photograph shows them gripping a Nazi eagle badge brazenly between their teeth, a silk scarf tied around their head, their hands dug into their coat pockets, their eyes staring defiantly at the camera.
Queer history was hardly remembered or archived after 1945. To this day, we know only some of the pioneers of the queer emancipation movement. We know even less about the life of those who were persecuted, driven into exile, murdered – or simply remained invisible.
After the end of the war, queer people continued to be marginalised. Gay men in particular continued to suffer in large numbers under Paragraph 175, many of whom did not go free but were transferred from concentration camps directly to prisons.
The ongoing discrimination by state and society changed only slowly. In 1969, Paragraph 175 was reformed and criminal law liberalised. Beginning in the 1970s, new social movements emerged, including a homosexual emancipation movement. Various groups reclaimed the “pink triangle” as a symbol to stand up for the rights of queer people.
Lesbian and feminist groups also gained popularity during the 1970s. Although lesbian sexuality was not directly persecuted by the state, many suffered from the misogynistic legal situation. The legal preferential treatment of men made it difficult to live out lesbian relationships, due to discrimination in labor and marriage laws.
The emergence of HIV in the 1980s affected many gay men and trans* people: thousands became infected, developed AIDS, and died. The state did not help, but instead relied on stigmatising measures and an aggressive rhetoric of exclusion, especially in Bavaria. For those affected, this recalled the previous period of open persecution.
Thanks to the efforts of activists, the health, political, and social situation of LGBTQI+ persons has improved since the 1990s. Today, queer people in Germany can celebrate some achievements and are also represented in politics. However, much remains to be done for LGBTQI+ equality. In many places around the world the situation is increasingly deteriorating. Trans* people in particular continue to face great discrimination.
Therefore, the commitment to queer self-determination is not over, but more relevant than ever. Because in the end, it not only ensures the preservation of LGBTIQ* human rights, but creates a more just society for all.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing in the bottom image at left on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Head of a youth / Portrait of a boy (1901); and at right on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Pierrot (Nd) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Paul Hoecker (German, 1854-1910) Young Man’s Head Cover of Jugend magazine, volume 44, 1901 Public domain
A chapter of TO BE SEEN #QueerLives is dedicated to the artist Paul Hoecker (1854-1910). It was created in collaboration with @forummuenchenev, which researches Hoecker’s story to honor and commemorate his life and work.
Paul Hoecker shaped the Munich art scene in the late 19th century. After his homosexuality became known, the artist was excluded and fell into oblivion. As a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Hoecker had a great deal of influence during his lifetime: almost all the painters in the artist group “Die Scholle” and many illustrators for the magazines “Simplicissimus” and “Die Jugend” were among his students. The co-founder of the Munich Secession also received great recognition for his artistic work.
Hoecker privately exchanged views with the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld about the fact that he has “contrasexual tendencies”, i.e. is gay. When a sex worker was recognised in the model of his acclaimed work “Ave Maria”, he was involuntarily outed. Paul Hoecker forestalled a scandal by resigning from his professorship. In this way he was able to avoid having to take a public position on his sexuality. He withdrew first to Italy and later to his home in Silesia, Oberlangenau.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Paul Hoecker (German, 1854-1910)
Paul Hoecker (11 August 1854, Oberlangenau – 13 January 1910, Munich) was a German painter of the Munich School and founding member of the Munich Secession…
The Munich Academy
In 1891, at the young age of 36, he was appointed to the Munich Academy, where he replaced Friedrich August von Kaulbach, who had resigned suddenly. He was the first teacher at the academy to take his students on field trips, which often lasted two weeks. He was also one of the first “modern” teachers there, exposing his students to impressionism and the latest developments from the Barbizon School. His studio was often referred to as the “Geniekasten” (Genius Box).
Due to the pervasive influence of Franz von Lenbach, very little exhibition space was available for any art that was considered modern. In 1892, shortly after being appointed a professor, this problem motivated Hoecker to become one of the founding members of the Munich Secession, acting as its secretary. The Secession ultimately inspired similar movements in Berlin and other cities.
Scandal
In 1897, a scandal broke out when it was rumoured that Hoecker had used a male prostitute as a model for a painting of the Madonna. Eventually, the scandal became more personal in nature, and he chose to resign from the academy. He then travelled to Capri, where he stayed at the Villa Lysis, home of industrialist and poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, who had left Paris in the wake of his own scandal. While there, Hoecker painted several portraits of Fersen’s lover, Nino Cesarini, a professional model. Though the Jugend magazine published one of his Nino portraits in 1904 – a fully clothed version. By 1901 he returned to Oberlangenau. In 1910, he died of what was diagnosed as “Roman Malaria”.
Posthumous recognition
Despite his important role for the Munich art scene of the late 19th century, Paul Hoecker is hardly known today. This is probably due to the fact that he left the professorship in connection with his homosexuality. In October 2019 a research group was formed at the Forum Queeres Archiv München to investigate the life and work of the painter. Part of the family owned estate of Paul Hoecker has found its way into the archive of the Forum Queeres Archiv München and was digitalised.
Elisàr August Emanuel von Kupffer (20 February 1872 – 31 October 1942) was a Baltic German artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym “Elisarion” for most of his writings…
Career
In 1895 he published Leben und Liebe (Life and Love), a book of poetry. In autumn of that year he moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin Art Academy and moved in with Von Mayer. The following year, he left Agnes and wrote the dramas Der Herr der Welt (Master of the World), and Irrlichter (Wisps) as well as three one-act plays. In 1897 he published the anthology Ehrlos (Infamous, or Dishonorable).
Von Mayer graduated in 1897 and they travelled throughout Italy, Sicily, Southern France and Geneva before returning to Berlin. They spent the summer in Thuringia and Heiligendamm and went back to Italy in 1899. Early next year, Adolf Brand published Von Kupffer’s influential anthology of homoerotic literature, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (roughly, “Love of Favourites and Love Between Friends in World Literature”. Lieblingminne is a neologism created by Von Kupffer). The anthology was researched and created, in part, as a protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England. It was reprinted in 1995.
In 1908 he published a book on Il Sodoma, the Renaissance artist. In 1911, he and Von Mayer founded the publishing house Klaristische Verlag Akropolis in Munich and Von Kupffer published three major works: a play, Aino und Tio, Hymnen der heiligen Burg (Hymns of the Holy Castle) and Ein neuer Flug und eine heilige Burg (A New Flight and a Holy Castle). His work was also published and reviewed in the gay magazine Akademos, published by Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. That same year, he and Von Meyer announced the creation of a “new religion”, Klarismus (Clarity), and established a community in Weimar. The following year he published a book on Klarismus called Der unbekannte Gott (The Unknown God). In 1913, the Brogi Gallery in Florence hosted his first art exhibition. Later that year, a Klarist community was established in Zürich.
Later life and death
In 1915, with World War I in progress and growing animosity towards Germans, they left Italy and moved to Ticino, where Von Kupffer established himself as a painter and muralist in Locarno, Switzerland. They were granted Swiss citizenship in 1922. From 1925 to 1929 they transformed their villa in Minusio, near Lake Maggiore, into an opulent collection of art, the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion”. He was also a photographer, making photographic studies of boys for use in the creation of his paintings, but most of his works featured a youthful version of himself. The Klarist “Elisarion Community” was founded at Minusio in 1926. During the 1930s, the number of visitors increased, then sharply decreased; stopping altogether just before the onset of World War II.
As his health declined, he became reclusive and died on 31 October 1942. Since 1981 the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion” has been a Museum dedicated to Von Kupffer’s work. The villa was willed to the municipality of Minusio, and his ashes are interred inside, together with Von Meyer’s. The Elisarion Community was satirically referenced as the “Polysadrion” (roughly; Place of Many Idiots), in the 1931 novel Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky.
Germaine Luise Krull (20 November 1897 – 31 July 1985) was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorised as German, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as “an especially outspoken example” of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who “could lead lives free from convention”, she is best known for photographically illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.
Max Peiffer Watenphul (German, 1896-1976) Stillleben mit Mimosen (Still Life with Mimosas) 1932
Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896 – 13 July 1976) was a German artist. Described as a “lyric poet of painting”, he belongs to a “tradition of German painters for whom the Italian landscape represented Arcadia.” In addition to Mediterranean scenes, he regularly depicted Salzburg and painted many still lifes of flowers. As well as oil paintings, his extensive body of work encompasses watercolours, drawings, enamel, textiles, graphic art, and photographs.
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili with a Feather Fan 1920
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili Elbe c. 1928
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) At the mirror 1931-1936
On December 31, 1932 … this advertisement for Hella Knabe’s tailoring studio appeared in “Die Freund”. In the 1920s, a separate infrastructure was also created for “transvestites” – people who preferred the clothing of the opposite sex, including trans* people. Hella Knabe’s made-to-measure studio became a nationwide attraction. The hairdresser and seamstress, whose husband was a “transvestite” himself, advertised not only in scene magazines, but also in national magazines such as Jugend and Simplicissimus.
Hella Knabe made women’s underwear, artificial busts, corsets and chastity belts for her customers and ran a mail order business. In addition, she received boarders, clothed them, applied make-up and enabled them to live in the opposite sex for a short time. She continued to offer her services after 1933 and kept in touch with her clients through her own magazine with subcultural content. In 1938 she was therefore fined for distributing “lewd literature”.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Damenbar (Lesbian Bar) c. 1930-1932 Lithograph
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Siesta c. 1930-1932
Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter and illustrator of the Weimar period. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements. She is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life.
Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin, the daughter of a successful German merchant. She and her family moved to Paris when she was five years old. She studied art in Paris, Brussels and Rome from 1906-1911. Her early work, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadent movement, was exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1912 and 1913.
In 1916 Mammen and her family fled Paris to avoid internment during World War I. While her parents moved to Amsterdam, Mammen chose instead to return to Berlin. She was now financially on her own for the first time, as the French government had confiscated all of her family’s property. For several years Mammen struggled to make ends meet, taking any work she could find, and spending time with people from different class backgrounds. These experiences and newfound sympathies are reflected in her artwork from the period.
In time Mammen was able to find work as a commercial artist, producing fashion plates, movie posters, and caricatures for satirical journals such as Simplicissimus, Ulk, and Jugend. In the mid-1920s she became known for her illustrations evoking the urban atmosphere of Berlin. Much of her artwork depicted women. These women subjects often included haughty socialites, fashionable middle-class shop girls, street singers, and prostitutes. Her drawings were often compared to those of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s she worked mainly in pencil with watercolour washes, and in pen and ink.
In 1921, Mammen moved into an apartment with her sister in Berlin. This apartment was a former photographer’s studio which she lived in until her death. Aside from Art throughout her life Mammen also was interested in science. She was close friends with Max Delbrück who left Europe and took some of her artwork with him and exhibited them in California. In addition to bringing these art works to be exhibited he also sent Mammen care packages from the United States with art supplies.
In 1930 she had a major exhibition in the Fritz Gurlitt gallery. Over the next two years, at Gurlitt’s suggestion, she created one of her most important works: a series of eight lithographs illustrating Les Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs.
In 1933, following Mammen’s inclusion in an exhibition of female artists in Berlin, the Nazi authorities denounced her motifs and subjects as “Jewish”, and banned her lithographs for Les Chansons de Bilitis. The Nazis were also opposed to her blatant disregard to for apparent ‘appropriate’ female submissiveness in her expressions of her subjects. Much of her work also includes imagery of lesbians. The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for, and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies. Until the end of the war she practiced a kind of “inner emigration”. She stopped exhibiting her work and focused on advertising. For a time she also peddled second-hand books from a handcart.
In the 1940s, in a show of solidarity, Mammen began experimenting with Cubism and expressionism, a risky move given the Nazis’ condemnation of abstract art as “degenerate”. After the war she took to collecting wires, string, and other materials from the streets of bombed-out Berlin to create reliefs. In the late 1940s she began exhibiting her work again, as well as designing sets for the Die Badewanne cabaret. She created abstract collages from various materials, including candy wrappers. In the 1950s she adopted a new style, combining thick layers of oil paint with a few fine marks on the surface.
In the 1970s there was a resurgence of interest in Mammen’s early work as German art historians, as well as art historians of the women’s movement, rediscovered her paintings and illustrations from the Weimar period. In 2013 her later, more abstract work was featured in “Painting Forever!”, a large-scale exhibition held during Berlin Art Week. In 2017-2018, the Berlinische Galerie mounted a major exhibition of Mammen’s work, titled, “Jeanne Mammen: Die Beobachterin: Retrospektive 1910-1975” (Jeanne Mammen: The Observer: Retrospective 1910-1975), which included more than 170 works in various media, covering the period from the 1920s to her late work in the 1960s and beyond. The show was conceived as an update to a show mounted by the Galerie at the Martin Gropius Bau in 1997, which featured primarily works from the 1920s. In 2010 the Des Moines Art Center exhibited 13 water colour paintings done by Mammen which were inspired by Berlin in the Weimer era.
Renée Sintenis, née Renate Alice Sintenis (20 March 1888 – 22 April 1965), also known as Frau Emil R. Weiss, was a German sculptor, medallist, and graphic artist who worked in Berlin. She created mainly small-sized animal sculptures, female nudes, portraits, and sports statuettes. She is especially known for her Berlin Bear sculptures, which was used as the design for the Berlinale’s top film award, the Golden Bear…
Career
When Renée Sintenis (as she called herself from then on) met the sculptor Georg Kolbe in 1910, she became his model. She modelled for a now lost life-sized statue.
Inspired by this activity, she began creating in sculpture female nudes, expressive heads like those of André Gide and Joachim Ringelnatz, athletes like the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, and self-portraits in drawings, sculptures (in terracotta) and etchings.
After 1915, the concise animal figures emerged, which became the subject of her artistic life. Since she rejected monumentality in sculpture, she mainly created small-format sculptures. These small works of art such as horses, deers, donkeys and dogs, enjoyed great popularity with the public because they were cheaper, suitable as gifts and could be placed in small rooms.
From attending Kolbe’s studio, a long-term friendship developed, which he accompanied artistically. In the 1913 Berlin autumn exhibition, the first major exhibition of the Free Secession, Sintenis took part (as in the following years) with small-format plaster sculptures.
From 1913 on, she had her works cast in the Hermann Noack fine art foundry, which she attended artistically for decades.
In 1917 she married the type artist, book designer, painter and illustrator Emil Rudolf Weiß, whom she had met years earlier as her teacher and was also and then as a fatherly friend. He supported her and introduced her to numerous other artists. Their collaboration was limited to a few joint projects, of which the edition of the 22 Songs of the poems by Sappho, for which she created the etchings and Weiß made the font designs, achieved particular fame.
From 1913 she exhibited her sculptures regularly and was highly valued by her colleagues from the Free Secession, the most important Berlin artists’ association, among others, by Max Liebermann, Max Beckmann, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The opening of a gallery in Berlin in 1922 made her the most important protagonist of the well-known Flechtheim art circle in those years. The art-interested public was infatuated with her athletic figures, portraits of friends and the small-format self-portraits.
In addition, due to her body size, slim figure, charisma, her self-confident, fashionable demeanor and androgynous beauty, she was often portrayed by artists like her husband, Emil Rudolf Weiß and Georg Kolbe, and by photographers, like Hugo Erfurth, Fritz Eschen and Frieda Riess. She embodied perfectly the type of the ‘new woman’ of the 1920s, even if she appeared rather reserved.
During the Weimar Republic, Renée Sintenis became an internationally recognised artist, with exhibitions in the Berlin Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, in Paris, the Tate Gallery, in London, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, Glasgow and Rotterdam. Her small-sized depictions of athletes (boxers, footballers, runners) and portrait busts of their circle of friends were found in public and private collections around the world.
In 1928 Sintenis won the bronze medal in the sculpture section of the art competition for the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, for her “Footballeur”. She is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ Olympic medallist. Renée Sintenis took part in the 1929 exhibition of the German Association of Artists in the Cologne State House, with five small-format animal sculptures. In 1930 she met the French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Berlin. In 1931 she was appointed as the first sculptor, and second woman after Käthe Kollwitz, together with 13 other artists, to join the Berlin Academy of the Arts – Fine Arts section, although the National Socialists forced her to leave in 1934.
In 1932, she created a statue of the Berlin Bear, a bear standing on its hind legs with its arms raised, based on the Coat of arms of Berlin. The design was popular, and she sold many 15 cm (5.9 in) statues of the bear, which brought wealth and was taken up again in later life.
Third Reich
Emil Rudolf Weiß was dismissed from his university post on 1 April 1933, because of an angry statement against the Nazi regime and the law to reintroduce the civil service. Sintenis herself was excluded from the Academy of the Arts in 1934 because of her Jewish origins – her maternal grandmother was Jewish before her conversion. Nevertheless, she was able to stay in the Reich Chamber of Culture, even if her works were removed from public collections by the National Socialists.
During the Third Reich, Renée Sintenis and her husband Emil Rudolf Weiß lived with considerable restrictions. She continued to exhibit, although one of her self-portraits was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1934. Since she was not banned from exhibiting, she was represented in Düsseldorf by the art dealer Alex Vömel, Flechtheim’s successor. In contrast to the 1920s, she was not doing well financially, which was reinforced by the bronze casting ban of 1941.
Until the forced dissolution of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1936, Sintenis remained a member of the German Association of Artists. That she was sponsored by the NSDAP propagandist Hans Hinkel, as it was later claimed, has not been proven and is highly unlikely.
Her husband died unexpectedly on 7 November 1942 in Meersburg on the Lake Constance. His death plunged Sintenis into a deep crisis. As a result, she took over his studio in the Künstlerhaus on Kurfürstenstrasse, where Max Pechstein also worked. His family took temporarily on her when her studio house was destroyed by arson and several Allied bombings in 1945. Sintenis lost almost all of her possessions; all papers and parts of her work were lost. While most of the cast models were preserved, the plaster frames of most of the portrait heads were also destroyed. In a self-portrait mask from 1944, the hardships of the war years are visible in her features.
Post-war career
After the war, Sintenis and her partner Magdalena Goldmann moved into an apartment on Innsbrucker Strasse in 1945, where they both lived until their deaths. In 1948, Sintenis received the art prize of the city of Berlin and was appointed by Karl Hofer to the Berlin University of Fine Arts. She was appointed full professor in 1955, although she gave up teaching the same year. She was also appointed to the newly founded Academy of the Arts of Berlin (West) in 1955.
In the 1950s, she became very successful once again. She stayed true to her artistic focus and motifs, which she called “making animals”.
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) Girl Under Trees 2016 Courtesy the artist Photo: @frau_orla
In “These hands – a world without equal” (2022, below), the artist Lena Rosa Händle explores the continuation of hidden lesbian codes from the 1920s to the present day. Händle refers to the dancer Tilly Losch, the painter Mariette Lydis and the artist Claude Cahun and focuses on the motif of the hands as a gesture and code of lesbian people. In her photographs, @lenarosahaendle, together with DJane and curator @tonicahunter, reinterprets traditional gestures and is reminiscent of the first female photo studios of the 1920s.
For her work “Girls under Trees” (2016, above), Händle draws on the motif of a tapestry that schoolgirls painstakingly embroidered in 1941 in needlework classes, which were compulsory for girls at the time. Händle adds two personal ads from the newsreel published in Vienna in 1942 to the motif: “Miss is looking for correspondence with a girlfriend under modern” and “Lady wants a girlfriend for the purpose of cinema and theatre”. Advertisements like these are testimonies to the few coded signs of lesbian subculture during the Nazi era. Terms such as “Miss”, “Girlfriend” and “Lady” served as lesbian identification codes, as did the colours lilac and violet. In doing so, the artist sensitively refers to issues such as political power structures, socially enforced expectations and the resulting subtlety of lesbian aesthetics.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) These hands – a world without equal 2022 Courtesy the artist
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing Wolfgang Tillmans’s photograph The Cock (Kiss) (2002, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) The Cock (Kiss) 2002 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz
In their audiovisual piece Schreber is a Woman, the Barcelona-based artists’ collective El Palomar delves into the mind of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German lawyer (1842-1911) who became famous for his reports from a psychiatric clinic that later inspired Freud. In his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness from 1903 Schreber recounts feeling like a woman, among other experiences. The book influenced Sigmund Freud to elaborate his theories on paranoia and schizophrenia. Relevant to Schreber’s story is the fact that his father, Dr. Moritz Schreber, authored several books that proposed strict authoritarian models for the physical and moral education of children, which were very popular in Germany and other parts of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.
El Palomar uncover and reinterpret the writings of Schreber from a transfeminist perspective to deconstruct the Freudian link between Schreber and schizoprenic paranoia trough a queer viewpoint. Focusing on the images and sounds that Schreber describes in his memoirs, the film offers a rereading of the case as rooted in a period when gender identities were restricted to classical binary archetypes. Schreber is a Woman subverts the original circumstances of queer lineage, recontextualizing gender and pleasure in the present.
Anonymous. “Schreber is a Woman – Video Art on Queer and Trans History,” on the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism website Oct 7, 2022 [Online] Cited 10/04/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing work from Philipp Gufler’s series Quilts, in the bottom image Quilt #43 (Sophia Goudstikker) (2021) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Philipp Gufler (German, b. 1989) Quilt #50 (Lil Picard) 2022 Screenprint on fabric Courtesy the artist and Galerie Françoise Heitsch Photo: @frau_orla
In his quilts Philipp Gufler references queer artists, scholars, and places of queer life that have found little or no place in written memories and the historical canon. The series thus becomes an alternative archive that generates a form of intergenerational memory through the technique of “quilting.” In this technique the textiles left behind by deceased people are reassembled and contextualised. The fine materiality of the fabrics stands in direct contrast to the often massive, solid stone monuments of Western historiography. By reusing a variety of historical relics, he creates diverse personal and ancestral forms of memory of different origins. The choice of materials in the works is just as important as the choice of motifs and the associated stories that are told.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) In Frauenkleidung (In Women’s Clothing) 2019 Courtesy the artists and Edition Mosaik Salzburg Foto: @frau_orla
The poetry collection “In Frauenkleidung” (In Women’s Clothing, above) is a joint work by the lyricist Zoltán Lesi and the designer Ricardo Portilho and is dedicated to the lives of intergender athletes in the early 1930s. In their book, both artists combine documentary language with historical photographs and newspaper clippings drawn from Lesi’s image archive, which has been in the making since 2017. The resulting surrealistic collage uses historical distance to question facts, construction, and truth in a humorous yet sensitive way.
Parallel to the publication, they have created the audio installation “Ein Sprung und der Hummer” (A Jump and the Lobster, below) which, in the form of a Dadaist assemblage inspired by Joseph Cornell, blurs the line between fiction and the documentation of the biographies of the athletes, contributing another layer to the narrative level of the book of poems.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and the Lobster) (installation view) 2018/2022 Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and The Lobster) (installation view) 2018/2022 Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1 80333 Munich Phone: +49 (0)89 233-67000
Curator: Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford
Artist unknown (England) Portrait of a man (resembling Jabez Hogg) operating a daguerreotype camera c. 1845 Oil on canvas The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
This painting was acquired by the Bodleian Libraries at an auction and is the only known painting of a daguerreotypist at work. The man bears a strong resemblance to the photographer (and later ophthalmic surgeon) Jabez Hogg, who in 1843 published a ‘Manual of Photography’ and worked at the Illustrated London News from 1850 to 1866.
Fickle, fleeting time: illuminating a relationship between adaptability and uncertainty
The new medium – (in art) the substance the artist uses to create a piece of artwork, (in science) the substance that transfers the energy, or light from one substance to another substance or from one place to another, or from one surface to another, (in spirit) a person reputedly able to make contact with the world of spirits – of photography possessed the power to capture a pictorial truth to reality that could liberate, educate and memorialise while at the same time being used by the coercive power of the state, police, scientists and doctors (for example) to classify and control the sick, criminals, deviants, “natives” and “other” subjugated peoples.
In the Age of Machinery this instrument of new power harnessed technology and science to capture light in order to reflect back to man an image of himself as he would like to be seen – freezing a moment in time – as indeed the sitter had to stand still in order for their likeness to be captured in the early photographic processes. This action machine, an all dancing singing mix of paraphernalia, lens, metal, wood, glass and chemical reaction, forced a stillness in the sitter commensurate with the stillness of the resulting portrait image, im/mortal at one and the same time. By then by reflecting on that captured image the viewer could transcend time, bringing past time to present future time.
Imagine having never seen your picture before except in a cut-out silhouette or in a portrait drawing or oil painting. Imagine the shock of seeing your likeness before your eyes as a manifestation of a truth: this is what I look like at this point in time from the camera’s point of view – a manifestation of the energy of a person captured through the suspension of time, through the the spirit of the medium and, perhaps, through the medium of the spirit. That moment when the photograph is taken when you are taken out of yourself into another time and space. And then by looking at that image, coming to the understanding that you were already picturing your own death.
Within this exhibit one could dwell upon the Power of the new medium (to do what? to illuminate – make (something) visible/to help clarify or explain. What something is it helping to explain?) but rather, you might like to consider its adapt/ability to be so many things to so many people, to time travel a singular truth into the many truths to which reality points us. The shadow moves. In a medium where everything is supposedly “fixed” nothing is fixed, for everything is up for negotiation. Despite classification systems used to define categories and stereotypes in a bourgeois capitalist industrial society, this uncertainty of representation would have been incredibly confronting to a Victorian sensibility based on order and control – where everything, and every body (literally), had to be kept in its place.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Bodleian Libraries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“We are in the infancy of invention with sun pictures, and no man can predict the results which may be obtained from a further advance in the paths of discovery … an instrument of new power [has been] placed at the disposal of Ingenuity and of Art.”
From a leaflet published in 1846
A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 is a free exhibition in the Weston Library, running until the 7th May, 2023. This exhibition explores the early history of photography and its impact on British life. It examines the invention of the medium in its earliest incarnation, and how the broad range of uses had an unequivocal impact on British culture. From the invention of celebrity to the very first ‘travel photography’ and how this helped to consolidate colonial sensibilities. By showing how photography intersected with all aspects of a nascent modernity, A New Power reveals photography’s crucial role in making Britain the society it is today.
“The advent of photography was a complex historical event involving social, cultural and technological changes in about equal measure. These changes included significant developments in European society, such as the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but also important advances in scientific thinking and technology, and revolutionary shifts in the experience of time, space and subjectivity. All these elements were necessary to the conception of photography in the early 19th century.”
Exhibition text
Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg RA (French, 1740-1812) Iron Works, Coalbrook Dale c. 1824 From The romantic and picturesque scenery of England and Wales, London 1805, pl.[7] Etching, aquatint
“The men, women, children, country and houses are all black … The country continues black, … everywhere, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children”
~ The Princess Victoria in a diary entry about a trip to Birmingham, 1832
The advent of photography was a complex historical event involving social, cultural and technological changes in about equal measure. These changes included significant developments in European society, such as the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but also important advances in scientific thinking and technology, and revolutionary shifts in the experience of time, space and subjectivity. All these elements were necessary to the conception of photography in the early 19th century.
“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it … the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word”
View of factory interior with five rows of c. 100 power looms using overhead lathe drives, operatives women, visitor and children looking around, spare rollers in corner. [James Nasmyth patents for printing calicoes etc, 1849-1850; Thomas Robinson textile machinery patents, 1844-1849] Factory located in Stockport, Cheshire.
About the exhibition
The announcement of photography’s invention in January 1839, first in Paris and then in London, introduced a ‘new power’ into British life. This new power – derived from photography’s capacity to automatically capture the images created in a camera – was soon being used for every conceivable purpose.
A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 explores the early history of photography, starting with the invention of the medium and the earliest dissemination of photographic images in Britain and ending with the famous Great Exhibition of 1851. It examines the broad range of uses that photography would quickly come to fill, from documenting the invention of celebrity to the very first ‘travel photography’ and how this helped to shore up colonial sensibilities.
By showing how photography intersected with all aspects of a nascent modernity, A New Power reveals photography’s crucial role in making Britain the society it is today.
Early experiments
In June 1802, Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy co-authored an essay in the Journals of the Royal Institution. It described various experiments the two men had undertaken on making images by exposing to light some pieces of white paper or leather moistened with a solution of silver nitrate. The essay is often considered to be the first to describe specifically photographic experiments. Davy’s colleague Thomas Young made further experiments with silver nitrate in 1804.
“White paper, or white leather, moistened with solution of nitrate of silver, undergoes no change when kept in a dark place; but, on being exposed to the day light, it speedily changes colour, and, after passing through different shades of grey and brown, becomes at length nearly black … Nothing but a method of preventing the unshaded part of the delineation from being coloured by exposure to the day is wanting, to render the process as useful as it is elegant.”
~ Humphry Davy and Thomas Wedgwood (1802)
“I formed an image of the rings, by means of the solar microscope, with the apparatus which I have described in the Journals of the Royal Institution, and I threw this image on paper dipped in a solution of nitrate of silver, placed at the distance of about nine inches from the microscope”
~ Thomas Young (1804)
Scientific entertainments
Scientific experiments were frequently presented as public entertainments in the early 19th century. One satirical cartoon shows an experiment conducted at the Royal Institution in London by Thomas Young. He is seen administering nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, to Sir John Coxe Hippisley, with hilariously unfortunate results. On Young’s left is Humphry Davy, holding a pair of bellows. The audience includes many celebrities of the time. Davy and Young also conducted photographic experiments in this laboratory.
Fleeting time
A number of artists in the early 19th century tried to reconcile ‘fleeting time’ with the stasis of a painted landscape. In 1822, Louis Daguerre and his fellow artist Charles Marie Bouton opened their Diorama building in Paris. In the Diorama, viewers sat on a platform that slowly moved so that different views of the same painted scene, enhanced by special lighting and other effects, could appear to gradually reveal themselves. This apparatus was described by its inventors as ‘imitating aspects of nature as presented to our sight, that is to say, with all the changes brought by time, wind, light, atmosphere’.
“An attempt has been made to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearance of the Chiar’oscuro in Nature … to give ‘to one brief moment caught from fleeting time’ a lasting and sober existence”
~ John Constable (1833)
John Constable (British 1776-1837) Study of clouds 1822 Oil on paper, laid on canvas [verso inscribed ’31 Sep.r 10-11 o’clock morning looking Eastward a gentle wind to East’] H 48 x W 59cm Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford Presented by Sir E. Farquhar Buzzard, Bt, 1933
One of a group of cloud studies from 1822 which are so accurate in their record of weather conditions, that Constable’s mistake in dating this example can be silently corrected to 1 October 1822.
Computing and photography
Shortly after his announcement of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot sent Charles Babbage eight examples of his photogenic drawings. Babbage went on to display Talbot’s photographs at his famous London soirées, intellectual gatherings that Talbot and his family occasionally attended in person. The other entertainments included a working model of a portion of Babbage’s first computing machine, the Difference Engine. Visitors therefore encountered photography and computing together, seeing both for the first time at the same time.
“Many thanks for the loan of those beautiful photographs. They were much admired last Saturday Evg … In the meantime, I gave Lady Byron a treat to whom I lent them for a few hours”
~ Charles Babbage, in a letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 26 February 1844
Women and photography
Women played an often overlooked but important role in the development of British photography. Pioneering scholars like Elizabeth Fulhame and Mary Somerville were among the first to conduct experiments with light-sensitive silver salts and publish their results.
“The possibility of making cloths of gold, silver, and other metals, by chymical processes, occurred to me in the year 1780 ….”
~ Elizabeth Fulhame, from An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous (November 1794)
“In my experiments … I employ the chloride of silver, which Mr Faraday was so kind as to prepare for me, and which, accordingly, was perfectly pure and white. It was liquid and might be uniformly spread over the paper.”
~ Mary Somerville, from ‘Extract of a letter from Mrs Somerville to M. Arago: Chemical Rays of the Solar Spectrum’, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (October 1836 – April 1837)
Beautiful shadows
English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot first conceived of the possibility of a photographic process in 1833 and soon began experimenting with light-sensitive chemistry at his home, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Initially, he only shared the results of his experiments with family members, including his sister-in-law, Laura Mundy. Her reply is the earliest description we have of photographic images.
“Dear Mr Talbot, Thank you very much for sending me such beautiful shadows.”
~ Laura Mundy, in a letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 13 December 1834
Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey RA (English, 1781-1841) Bust of Miss Mundy 1825-1826 Plaster Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Inventing photography
“The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic, and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seems only destined for a single instant to occupy.”
~ William Henry Fox Talbot, writing in January 1839
The invention of the daguerreotype – a photographic process in which an image is recorded on a sheet of silver-plated copper – was announced in Paris on 7 January 1839. Daguerreotypomania ensued. The extraordinary news was reported in British newspapers just a few days later. This prompted English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot to reveal that he, too, had been working on photographic experiments, a paper-based process that he called photogenic drawing. These twin announcements heralded the advent of photography in Britain. Soon, actual examples could be seen in shops or in reproduction.
“M. Daguerre has discovered a method to fix the images which are represented at the back of a camera obscura; so that these images are not the temporary reflection of the object, but their fixed and durable impress.”
~ Hippolyte Gaucheraud, as translated in The Literary Gazette, 12 January 1839
Photogenic drawings
William Henry Fox Talbot published the details of his invention of photogenic drawing in January 1839, so that anyone with the means and some chemical knowledge could use the process. John Herschel soon devised his own light-sensitive formula and made a camera picture, a view of the framework of his father’s forty-foot telescope. He ‘washed out’ the image with hyposulphite of soda, which, unlike Talbot’s use of table salt, entirely prevented further development. In contrast, Talbot’s photogenic drawings remain light sensitive and therefore cannot be displayed in this exhibition.
‘Pictures Formed by the Action of Light’ From The Mechanic and Chemist: a Magazine of the Arts and Sciences (13 April 1839) Wood engravings after photogenic drawings Radcliffe Science Library, University of Oxford
“The Mechanic and Chemist was one of the better-established of the pioneering illustrated journals, already entering its fourth year of publication. It was started by George Berger, a publisher and bookseller based in the Strand, who launched a wide range of such publications. Most of these collapsed by the mid-1840s, but were in their heyday in 1839. Wood engravings were the most practical way for these publications to include pictures. Far less expensive and much faster for ‘woodcutters’ or ‘woodpeckers’ to produce than steel or copper engravings, unlike lithographs they were intaglio and could be printed alongside the type in a conventional letterpress. The journal had already published accounts of Daguerre’s and Talbot’s inventions, with a strong bias towards Daguerre, and on 13 April 1839 it attempted to express these inventions in visual form. The photographer here, ‘Q.E.D’, said that the silhouette negative had been “taken with the sun behind, forming a strong contrast of light and shade: the preparation not being sensible enough to show the intermediate shades directly.” Apparently overlooking the fact that Talbot had published the idea of making a print from the negative right from the start, Q.E.D. thought he had invented “a method of transforming such pictures into true representations of nature.””
Larry J Schaaf. “Revelations & Representations,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 27th May 2016 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023
‘Fac-Simile of a Photogenic Drawing’ From The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (20 April 1839) Wood engraving after a photogenic drawing contact photograph by Golding Bird
My personal favourite early woodcut representation of a photogenic drawing is this one, published a week later and coming much closer to mimicking the nature of one of Talbot’s originals. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction had taken the exceptional step of printing the wood block in a brown ink similar to the tone of photogenic drawings; this would have required a second printing of that sheet in black in for the type and represented a willingness to go to extra expense for the sake of accuracy. (Before colour printing became ubiquitous, I wish that publishers in the 1960s-1980s had recognised the value of this approach more often). The Mirror was one of the older illustrated journals, having started in 1822, and not everyone favoured its antiquarian editor, John Timbs. He explained that “our prefixed engraving is a fac-simile of a photogenic drawing, for which we are indebted to the kindness of Dr. Golding Bird, a distinguished botanist, who has published the following very interesting paper on the application of the photographic art to botanical purposes, in that excellent periodical, the Magazine of Natural History.” Dr. Bird (1814-1854) had been an outstanding chemist ever since a child. By 1836 he held the chair of Natural Philosophy at Guy’s Hospital in London. The next time your physician applies his stethoscope to your chest you will be benefitting from one of Bird’s many inventions. Bird wrote about the effects of light before 1839 and once photography was announced he devoted considerable attention to it in his publications. He at first tried Daguerre’s little-known process on paper, but preferred Talbot’s process, although noting that he wished that Talbot had published even more detailed instructions. Sadly, he died early and none of his own photographs are known to have survived.
Larry J Schaaf. “Revelations & Representations,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 27th May 2016 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023
‘Fac-Similes of Photogenic Drawings’ From The Magazine of Science (27 April 1839) Wood engravings after photogenic drawing contact photographs by George William Francis
A very new journal, The Magazine of Science featured the work of a botanist contemporary with Talbot, George William Francis (1800-1865). In 1843 he emigrated to Australia, forming the first Botanic Garden there, in Adelaide. Francis explained that he had photographically sensitised boxwood blocks and made the above photographic impressions directly on them. These were then sent to the wood engraver. The editor felt that the lace was accurately represented but “in the flowers he has failed to express the delicacy and beauty of the drawings.”
Unlike the other journals, The Magazine of Science had delayed publishing about the new invention “because we were desirous in this, as in all things else, to test and, if possible, improve upon the experiments suggested by Mr. Talbot, and since pursued with such ardour by all the philosophers and artists of this country, of France, and of Germany. We now however proceed to give all the information in our power, having tried all the different receipts published.”
Larry J Schaaf. “Revelations & Representations,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 27th May 2016 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023
Sir John Herschel (British, 1792-1871) Experimental photogenic drawing of the mounting of Sir William Herschel’s 40-foot telescope in the garden of Herschel’s house at Slough October 1839 Photogenic drawing History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
At the time that this was taken, Sir William Herschel’s 40-foot telescope was already a famous astronomical symbol, although it was being demolished – hence the absence of the telescope’s tube. The only camera images Sir John Herschel is know to have taken are of his father’s telescope; they also include the first photograph to be taken on glass (now in the Science Museum, London).
Anonymous. “Photogenic Drawing 5,” on the Museum of the History of Science website Nd [Online] Cited 19/02/2023. No longer available online
Daguerreotypes and their copies
Shortly after the announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype in France, British enthusiasts began to import examples of such photographs. The glass shop owned by Claudet & Houghton also offered their customers a selection of French engravings derived from daguerreotypes. Daguerreotypes were taken in London as public demonstrations for the edification of audiences eager to see the latest advances in science and technology. In September 1840, the English journal Westminster Review published two lithographic images, traced from daguerreotypes that had been made in the Polytechnic Institution in London.
Studio of Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (France) (French, 1807-1873) West façade of Notre Dame cathedral, Paris 1839-1840 Daguerreotype Magdalen College, University of Oxford
Lerebours, an optical instrument maker, quickly embraced photography in his business, and pioneered both the market in architectural and scenic Daguerreotypes, as well as their reproduction as engravings, as witnessed in his serial work Excursions Daguerriennes. The plate size is 8.5 x 6.5 inches, the image is laterally reversed, and there is no gold toning – all characteristics of early Daguerreotypes from the period before portraiture became possible.
Anonymous. “Daguerreotype 1,” on the Museum of the History of Science website Nd [Online] Cited 19/02/2023. No longer available online
Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (French, 1807-1873) Plate 6: Egypte: Harem de Méhémet-Ali a Alexandre c. 1840 From Excursions daguerriennes, vues et monuments les plus remarquables du Globe (Paris: Rittner & Goupil, 1840-1842) Engraving after daguerreotype 10 13/16 × 15 1/2 × 2 3/16 in. (27.5 × 39.3 × 5.5cm) (Book) Public domain
This print played an important role in popularising the notion of the artist-daguerreotypist as trustworthy eyewitness. In March 1840, while Goupil-Fesquet and his teacher, Horace Vernet, were on a daguerreotype tour of Egypt and the Levant, a fake story circulated in the Parisian press claiming that Vernet had gained access to Muhammad ‘Ali’s harem. With this print and the accompanying text, Goupil-Fesquet aimed to prove, as “both ocular witness and daguerreotype operator,” that they had seen only the guarded entrance.
Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (French, 1807-1873) Plate 4, England, St Pauls and London c. 1840 From Excursions daguerriennes, vues et monuments les plus remarquables du Globe (Paris: Rittner & Goupil, 1840-1842) Engraving after daguerreotype 10 13/16 × 15 1/2 × 2 3/16 in. (27.5 × 39.3 × 5.5cm) (Book) Courtesy of a Private Collection
L.L. Boscawen Ibbetson (English, 1799-1869) Fossils, engraved on a daguerreotype plate 1840 From The Westminster Review September 1840, p. 460 Ink-on-paper lithograph by A. Friedel
Captain Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson (1799 – 8 September 1869) was an English 19th century geologist, inventor, organiser and soldier. He is particularly associated with early developments in photography. He was a member of the London Electrical Society and later a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 6 June 1850). Capt. Ibbetson developed a method of taking lithographic impressions from daguerreotypes… His illustration of a fossil, “Transverse section of madrepore” in TheWestminster Review of September 1840 is credited with being the first example of the use of limelight to shorten exposure times when making daguerreotypes.
Paper photographs had one distinct advantage over daguerreotypes: they could be printed in multiple copies and pasted into publications. A number of books and journals containing photographs were produced, seeking to demonstrate the efficacy of the new medium as a means of illustration. These publications met with mixed success, as the unreliable quality of their photographs could not compete with traditional engravings.
Anna Atkins and cyanotype
In a paper delivered to the Royal Society on 13 June 1842, John Herschel proposed a photographic process involving an iron salt that resulted in Prussian-blue images. He decided to call this ‘cyanotype’. Exploiting this invention, the English botanist Anna Atkins issued albums of cyanotype prints of seaweed and algae from 1843, and these are often regarded as the earliest photographic books.
Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) Sargassum bacciferum 1843 From Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853) Cyanotype 25.3 x 20cm (9 15/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
This photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005. Public domain
The photograph in the exhibition: Oriel College, University of Oxford
The first book to be photographically printed and illustrated, Photographs of British Algae was published in fascicles beginning in 1843 and is a landmark in the history of photography. Using specimens she collected herself or received from other amateur scientists, Atkins made the plates by placing wet algae directly on light-sensitised paper and exposing the paper to sunlight. In the 1840s, the study of algae was just beginning to be systematised in Britain, and Atkins based her nomenclature on William Harvey’s unillustrated Manual of British Algae (1841), labelling each plate in her own hand.
Although artistic expression was not her primary goal, Atkins was sensitive to the visual appeal of these “flowers of the sea” and arranged her specimens on the page in imaginative and elegant compositions. Uniting rational science with art, Photographs of British Algae is an ambitious and effective book composed entirely of cyanotypes, a process invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel and long used by architects to duplicate their line drawings as blueprints.
In 1846, the editor of the journal The Art-Union asked William Henry Fox Talbot to supply approximately 7000 salt prints to accompany a story about the calotype process. These prints were made at the Reading Establishment, a printing business run by Talbot’s former Dutch valet Nicolaas Henneman. Unfortunately for Talbot and Henneman, the Art-Union project proved to be a promotional and financial disaster, with most of the photographs, made in a rush, fading soon after publication.
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) View of one of the towers of Orleans Cathedral Taken on 21 June 1843 Published in The Art‑Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental (June 1846) Salted paper photograph from calotype negatives 16.3 x 20.2cm (6 7/16 x 7 15/16 in.)
This photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Barbara Schwartz Gift, in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz, and Rogers Fund, 1996. Public domain
The photograph in the exhibition: Private Collection
In 1840 Talbot devised a negative/positive process that allowed multiple prints of a single image – the procedural basis of nearly all photography since. Talbot’s negatives were made of thin writing paper; the fibrous texture obscured some detail, but it imparted softness and a graded tonality to the resulting print. This photograph, showing the upper levels of one tower of Orléans Cathedral, was made on June 7, 1843, when Talbot was en route to Paris to sell the French rights to his patented process. Because he was unsuccessful in this enterprise, the French did not make paper photographs for another decade.
Anonymous. “Cathedral at Orléans,” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 22/02/2023
Nicolaas Henneman (Netherlands/England, 1813-1898) The West Façade of Westminster Abbey Taken before May 1845 Published in The Art-Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental (June 1846) Salted paper photograph from calotype negatives The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Jean Horblit, in memory of Harrison D. Horblit, 1994
Talbot’s negative-positive photographic process, first made public in 1839, would change the dissemination of knowledge as had no other invention since movable type. To demonstrate the paper photograph’s potential for widespread distribution – its chief advantage over the contemporaneous French daguerreotype – Talbot produced The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. With extraordinary prescience, Talbot’s images and brief texts proposed a wide array of applications for the medium, including portraiture, reproduction of paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts, travel views, visual inventories, scientific records, and essays in art.
Despite the revolutionary nature of Talbot’s undertaking, or perhaps because of it, The Pencil of Nature was not a commercial success. Today fewer than forty substantially complete copies – many quite faded – are extant. The present example, containing all twenty-four plates and still in its rare original fascicle covers, was formerly in the collection of Talbot’s daughter Matilda.
Anonymous. “Westminster Abbey,” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 22/02/2023
Born in the Netherlands village of Heemskerk on December 8, 1813, virtually nothing is known about the life of Nicolaas Henneman, until he was hired as a member of inventor William Henry Fox Talbot’s domestic staff shortly after relocating to England in 1838. He quickly progressed to his master’s valet, and finally his most trusted darkroom assistant. Mr. Henneman was an eager student, and was soon collaborating with Mr. Talbot on a wide range of photographic experiments. He became an expert in the intricate calotype process that required both advanced chemistry knowledge and technical precision, but most of all patience. …
In 1843, Mr. Henneman accompanied his boss to France, where his photographs were subsequently featured in Mr. Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature publication. Buoyed by the critical acceptance, he took the bold move of leaving his employment with Mr. Talbot to open his own full-service calotype business, believed to be the first of its kind. Within the modest grounds of a former schoolyard, Mr. Henneman constructed a glass house to serve as his studio, and he received some modest commissions to illustrate various historical texts, including Mr. Talbot’s Sun Pictures in Scotland and Sir William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain. In 1848, chemist Thomas Malone became a junior partner, necessitating a name change to Henneman & Malone. With the appointment as “Photographer in Ordinary to Her Majesty,” his conversion to wet-collodion processing, and his successful experiments to reduce exposure times, Mr. Henneman seemed assured of financial prosperity. However, his target market was too small, and his business closed with little notice.
Although Nicolaas Henneman was of the industry’s earliest architects, by the mid-1850s, the London photographic community was becoming exceedingly overcrowded. The soft-spoken Dutchman found himself being pushed out by a younger generation. After Mr. Henneman’s business went bankrupt, his steadfast champion Mr. Talbot quietly paid off his creditors. He moved to Birmingham, where he became an operator for master photographers Napoleon Sarony and Robert White Thrupp, among others. This proved to be both commercially unsuccessful and creatively unsatisfying. Ever the survivor, Mr. Henneman bought and operated a lodging house at 18 Half Moon Street in London during the 1870s. He died on January 18, 1898 at the age of 84, with his photographic contributions virtually forgotten. Fortunately, however, many of Nicolaas Henneman’s photographs have been preserved and can be seen in the collections of Lacock Abbey, Bradford’s National Media Museum, and in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.
Anonymous. “Nicolaas Henneman,” on the Historic Camera website 3rd May 2020 [Online] Cited 22/02/2023
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Palace of Justice, Rouen Taken in May 1843 Published in The Art-Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental (June 1846) Salted paper photograph from calotype negatives
Talbot may not have intended his brief diversion to Rouen to be as significant as it has become, but during those four days of miserable weather, the creative baton was handed from art to photography – from Turner to Talbot. During a brief “éclairci” from bad weather, Henry took his camera half a mile from the hotel and into another era of history. Le Palais de Justice was one of the secular buildings of medieval Rouen, completed in 1508, occupying three fifths of an acre in a three sided quadrangle. It was described as an elaborately florid style “sumptuous in its decorations both without and within; its triple canopy windows enriched with mullions and tracery.”
Talbot concentrated on the ornate detail of these windows, isolating the intricate elements sculpted by skilled stonemasons over three centuries earlier. Now housing the Rouen criminal courts, Le Palais de Justice represented Henry’s liberation from rain-soaked captivity. The image above stands in magnificent contrast to his study of the lace curtained view from within the Hotel l’Angleterre. This time he was outside looking in.
“The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic, and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seems only destined for a single instant to occupy.”
William Henry Fox Talbot, writing in January 1839
Most extraordinary
A first-hand account of a demonstration of the daguerreotype process was given by two naval architects from India in a book they published in 1841: ‘And we also saw [at the Adelaide gallery in London] the Daguerreotype which is the most extraordinary production of modern times. We know not how better to describe it than to say, that it is embodying a shadow … In a room fitted up as a Theatre, with shutters by which the light can be totally excluded, M. Dele Croix, a French gentleman, explains all the process’.
“The appearance of these drawings is very peculiar. The shadows are a dull grey, varying until they become almost blacky and though the pictures they delineate are accurate in the extreme, they are not pleasing. They appear unnatural and look somewhat like a moonlight scene. The Daguerreotype, with all its necessary apparatus, is manufactured and sold in Paris, for about £20. In Bombay, where the sun is always powerful, pictures of scenery could daily be produced.”
~ Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, Journal of residence of two years and a half in Great Britain, London, 1841
Views of London
The earliest photographs of London were taken by visiting Frenchmen. Soon, however, demonstrations of the new process were being offered to audiences at the Polytechnic Institution and Adelaide Gallery in London. In early 1842, Antoine Claudet was commissioned by the newly established Illustrated London News to make a series of daguerreotype views of London. A wood-engraved panorama of the city was then derived from them. This panorama, ‘a picture bigger than anything previously issued’, was promised in the News‘s inaugural issue of 14 May 1842 as a gift to all who subscribed to the journal for six months.
M. de St Croix (French) Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square 1839 Daguerreotype in wood frame Victoria & Albert Museum, London
This is the oldest photograph in the Museum’s collection. It is a daguerreotype, a unique image formed on a silvered copper plate. The daguerreotype was the first photographic process, publicised in January 1839. It was named after its inventor, Louis Daguerre. Just a few weeks after the French Government revealed the secrets of daguerreotypy in Paris in August 1839, Monsieur de St Croix organised the first public demonstration of the process in London. This is therefore among the very first photographs taken in London. The scene is reversed – as is characteristic of the process – and the image on the shiny surface is difficult to read. However, once caught at the correct angle, amazing detail emerges. In the foreground there is a statue of Charles I and in the distance the royal Banqueting House. There are also traces of the people who stayed still long enough to register on the exposure, which probably lasted some minutes.
Ebenezer Landells (engraver) et al ‘London in 1842, Taken from the Summit of the Duke of York’s Column (north view)’ From the Illustrated London News (7 January 1843) Hand-coloured panoramic print, from wood engravings after daguerreotypes by Antoine Claudet taken in 1842
A view of London looking northwards from the summit of the Duke of York’s statue, with Carlton Gardens in the foreground, beyond is Waterloo Place, lower Regent Street and Piccadilly circus.
London labour, London poor
Numerous engraved portraits of members of the working class are featured in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851. Mayhew’s text provided a richly ethnological and often racialised commentary on London’s street workers, based on interviews and social analysis, given added force by the addition of wood engravings based on daguerreotypes.
Portrait of Henry Mayhew (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)
“My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those sufferings, of the poor.”
The London Coffee-Stall (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)
“The struggle to get a living is so great, that, what with one and another in the coffee-trade, it’s only those as can get good ‘pitches’ that can get a crust at it.”
The Irish Street-Seller (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD) From Henry Mayhew’s ‘London labour and the London poor: a cyclopedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, cannot work, and will not work’, Volume 1 page 97, 1851. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
“I wish people that thinks we’re idle now were with me for a day. I’d teach them.”
Hindoo Tract-Seller (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)
“The man whose portrait supplies the daguerreotyped illustration of this number is unable to speak a word of English, and the absence of an interpreter, through some accident, prevented his statement being taken at the time appointed.”
The Blind Boot-Lace Seller (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)
“I only wish vaccination had been in vogue then as it is now, and I shouldn’t have lost my eyes. God bless the man who brought it up, I say; people doesn’t know what they’ve got to thank him for.”
All from
Henry Mayhew (English, 1812-1887) London labour and the London poor; a cyclopedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work: The London street-folk; comprising, street sellers. Street buyers. Street finders. Street performers. Street artizans. Street labourers. With numerous illustrations from photographs London, 1851
‘London Labour and the London Poor’ is an oral account of London’s working classes in the mid-19th century. Taking the form of verbatim interviews that carefully preserve the grammar and pronunciation of every interviewee, the completed four-volume work amounts to some two million words: an exhaustive anecdotal report on almost every aspect of working life in London.
Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 – 25 July 1887) was an English journalist, playwright, and advocate of reform. He was one of the co-founders of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841, and was the magazine’s joint editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days. He is also known for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle that was later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the city’s poor.
Henry Mayhew (English, 1812-1887) London labour and the London poor; a cyclopedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work: The London street-folk; comprising, street sellers. Street buyers. Street finders. Street performers. Street artizans. Street labourers. With numerous illustrations from photographs London, 1851
Priests and politicians
All sorts of celebrities were celebrated in engravings based on daguerreotypes, from priests to politicians. One example is Lájos Kossuth, former regent-president of the Kingdom of Hungary, who arrived as an exile at the port of Southampton on 23 October 1851. Over the next three weeks he toured Britain, giving lectures in support of the struggle to free Hungary from the Hapsburg Empire. During this period, he and his family visited Antoine Claudet’s studio in London to have a number of daguerreotype portraits made. Versions of these images were subsequently distributed around the world in the form of lithographs or engravings.
Alonzo Chappel (American, 1828-1887)(engraver) Thomas Chalmers: Likeness from a daguerreotype by Claudets [sic] 1873 Steel engraving of a Scottish clergyman after a daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet studio in c. 1847 Public domain
Alonzo Chappel (March 1, 1828 – December 4, 1887) was an American-Spanish painter, best known for paintings depicting personalities and events from the American Revolution and early 19th-century American history.
Thomas Chalmers FRSE (17 March 1780 – 31 May 1847), was a Scottish minister, professor of theology, political economist, and a leader of both the Church of Scotland and of the Free Church of Scotland. He has been called “Scotland’s greatest nineteenth-century churchman.”
Notable commissions
A particularly notable commission for the Beard studio involved making daguerreotype portraits in May 1845 on the deck of the H.M.S. Erebus. The subjects were fourteen of the officers about to set out under the command of Sir John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage above Canada. These pictures became particularly famous when the entire expedition disappeared, never to be heard from again. After a public campaign by Lady Franklin in the illustrated press, many other ships were sent over during the ensuing years to try and find the expedition.
Installation view of Studio of Richard Beard daguerreotypes of Sir John Franklin (May 1845, below) and Lieutenant Graham Gore, Commander (May 1845, below)
Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) Sir John Franklin May 1845 Daguerreotype in leather case The Scott Polar Institute, University of Cambridge Public domain
Sir John Franklin, 16 May 1845, suffering from influenza before leaving for the Arctic. He is wearing the 1843-1846 pattern Royal Navy undress tailcoat with cocked hat.
Lady Franklin commissioned daguerreotype photographs of the twelve senior officers of HMS Erebus and Captain Crozier of HMS Terror. They were taken on board the Erebus at the dockside in Greenhithe on 16 May 1845, just before the ships sailed. Franklin was fascinated by this new technology and included photographic apparatus as part of the expedition’s equipment.
Sir John Franklin KCH FRS FLS FRGS (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin’s ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later and the entire crew died, from causes such as starvation, hypothermia, and scurvy.
Richard Beard (22 December 1801 – 7 June 1885) was an English entrepreneur and photographer who vigorously protected his photographic business by litigation over his photographic patents and helped to establish professional photography in the UK.
Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) Lieutenant Graham Gore, Commander May 1845 Daguerreotype in leather case The Scott Polar Institute, University of Cambridge Public domain
This daguerreotype, produced and enamelled by the studio of Richard Beard, was purchased by Queen Victoria in 18522, the same year in which her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arranged for the Tyrolese minstrels to surprise the Queen with a serenade at breakfast for her birthday at Osborne. About the event, the Duchess wrote: “Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise.”
Hand-coloured enamelled daguerreotype of a group of Tyrolese singers called Klier, Rainer, Margreiter, Rahm and Holaus. Rahm is seated facing partly left playing a dulcimer and Rainer holds a guitar. All are wearing traditional Tyrolese costume, coloured with both dark and pastel tones. The daguerreotype is mounted in a large dark blue leather case with a red velvet interior. Queen Victoria had first seen this troupe of Tyrolese singers at Kensington Palace in 1833. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, later arranged for the singers to perform at Osborne on her birthday in 1852. The Duchess recorded in her diary that ‘dearest Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise’. Later the same year Queen Victoria acquired this daguerreotype. Beard had shown examples of his enamelled daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition in 1851. The process involved varnishing the daguerreotype and then heating and adding another coat of varnish after the colour pigments had been added.
This daguerreotype shows Tyrolese minstrels in carefully tinted folkloric costumes and holding musical instruments. A variant view was the basis of a wood engraving published in the Illustrated London News in 1851 (below). For Queen Victoria’s birthday at Osborne in 1852, her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arranged for the singers to serenade her at breakfast. ‘Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise’, the Duchess wrote. This daguerreotype, enamelled according to Beard’s patented formula, was purchased by the Queen in the same year.
Smyth (engraver) ‘The Tyrolese Minstrels – from a photograph taken by Beard, by desire of H.R.H. The Duchess of Kent’ From the Illustrated London News (6 December 1851) Wood engraving after a daguerreotype by Richard Beard Jr. Private Collection
Fascinating people
The popular press, and especially the Illustrated London News, soon included wood engraved copies of photographic portraits of celebrities and indigenous people from the colonies of the British Empire. Equally exotic to middle-class viewers, however, were photographic illustrations of members of the British working class. In every case, the daguerreotype was destroyed during the tracing process that led to its wood-engraved copy, leaving these reproductions behind as a kind of shadow history of the medium. In this form, photographic images circulated all around the globe.
Photographer unknown (English) Seated man holding a copy of the Illustrated London News c. 1850 Hand-painted daguerreotype in leather case Private Collection
Engraver unknown (England) ‘The Walpole Islanders at the Panopticon. – From a photograph by Claudet’ 1856 From the Illustrated London News (12 July 1856), page 41 Courtesy of a Private Collection
Modern art and swansdown
These ‘lords and ladies’ dressed in historical costumes for a ball appeared as wood engravings after daguerreotypes taken by Richard Beard Jr. in the Illustrated London News in July 1848. A review in the Nottingham Mercury on 6 October 1848 commended the photographer for the quality of his work, calling it ‘modern art combined with science’.
“Swansdown on black is produced in the most exquisite style, and the finest white lace brought out in bold relief on a dress of white satin.”
~ Nottingham Mercury (6 October 1848)
Smyth (engraver) ‘The Spitalfields Ball. Costume Portraits, from daguerreotypes, by Beard’ From the Illustrated London News (15 July 1848, p. 24) Wood engravings after daguerreotypes by Richard Beard Jr. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Extraordinary Australians
The English-born photographer Douglas T. Kilburn (brother of Edward Kilburn) arrived in Melbourne, Australia, in 1847. Kilburn made a series of daguerreotypes of local indigenous people in about October of that same year. These daguerreotype images were then reproduced around the world in various media. They found their widest audience when a number of them were reproduced as wood engravings in an 1850 issue of the Illustrated London News, along with an accompanying text that expressed the usual racial prejudices of the time.
Unknown engravers (England) ‘Australia Felix’ From the Illustrated London News (26 January 1850, p. 53) Wood engravings after daguerreotypes by Douglas Kilburn, Melbourne Private Collection
Daguerrotype studios
The first commercial photography studio in England was opened by Richard Beard in the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London in March 1841. It made small daguerreotype portraits using an American invention, a camera that employed a concave mirror rather than a lens to focus the light. Soon, superior, lens-enhanced cameras and more light-sensitive plates allowed for larger and more lively portraits to be made by an ever-increasing number of professional studios.
One of the earliest clients of the Richard Beard studio in London was the 73-year-old Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth. She had several portraits taken, at a guinea each, during mid-morning on 25 May 1841. About five years later, she returned to the same studio and had a second portrait made.
Her letter to her half-sister Fanny Wilson describes her first portrait session.
“I fear you will not like any of my daguerreotype faces – I am sure I do not – the truer, the worse”
~ Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to Fanny Wilson, 28 May 1841
‘Lestock came with me to breakfast here at 8 o’clock and then he took Honora and Captain Beaufort and me to the Polytechnic and we all had our likenesses taken and I will tell you no more lest I should some way or other cause you disappointment. For my own part my object is secure for I have done my dear what you wished. It is a wonderful mysterious operation. You are taken from one room into another up stairs and down and you see various people whispering and hear them in neighbouring passages and rooms unseen and the whole apparatus and stool on high platform under a glass dome casting a snap-dragon blue light making all look like spectres and the men in black gliding about like &c. I have not time to tell you more of that’.
Maria Edgeworth, Letter to Fanny Wilson, 25 May 1841 MS. Eng. Lett. c. 710, fol. 1r
Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) (Royal Polytechnic Institution, London) Portrait of Maria Edgeworth May 1841 Daguerreotype in vertical leather case
Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) (Royal Polytechnic Institution, London) Portrait of an older man c. 1841 Courtesy of a Private Collection
Forty a day
Using a number of different operators, the studio owned by Richard Beard claimed to make about 40 daguerreotype portraits per day. Soon he ran three such studios in London and had licensed a dozen more elsewhere in England. As the English patent holder for the daguerreotype process, Beard insisted that each of these daguerreotypes be stamped with the words ‘Beard Patentee’, wherever they were made. Having established photography as a franchise system, he became, in effect, the Colonel Sanders of early English photography.
Laman Blanchard ed. ‘Photographic Phenomena’ George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (London Tilt and Borgue, 1842) London, 1842 Wood engraving by George Cruikshank of the Beard Studio and a poem by S.L. Blanchard Courtesy of a Private Collection
Fierce enemy
Disputing who had exclusive rights to the commercial use of the daguerreotype process, Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet took several legal actions against each other. In a letter to William Henry Fox Talbot dated 18 January 1843, Claudet refers to Beard as his ‘competitor and fierce enemy’. Having overturned an injunction prohibiting his use of the process, Claudet quickly became Beard’s greatest rival. Soon, however, other competitors also opened studios in London, with those run by Edward Kilburn and John Mayall among the most significant.
Studio of Antoine Claudet (French, 1797-1867) (Adelaide Gallery, London) Portrait of Michael Faraday c. 1848 Daguerreotype and leather case History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
Claudet invented one of the improvements that made the Daguerreotype fast enough to take portraits; Faraday’s association with photography began in January 1839 when he announced Talbot’s discovery at the Royal Institution in London.
Michael Faraday FRS (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English natural philosopher who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis.
Antoine François Jean Claudet (French, 1797-1867)
Antoine François Jean Claudet (August 18, 1797 – December 27, 1867) was a French photographer and artist active in London who produced daguerreotypes. …
Early in his career Claudet headed a glass factory at Choisy-le-Roi, Paris, together with Georges Bontemps, and moved to England to promote the factory with a shop in High Holborn, London. Having acquired a share in L. J. M. Daguerre’s invention, he became one of England’s first commercial photographers using the daguerreotype process for portraiture, improving the sensitising process by using chlorine (instead of bromine) in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action.
He invented the red darkroom safelight, and it was he who suggested the idea of using a series of photographs to create the illusion of movement. The idea of using painted backdrops has also been attributed to him.
From 1841 to 1851 he operated a studio on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery (now the Nuffield Centre), behind St. Martin’s in the Fields church, London, where in 1843 he took one of only two surviving photographs of Ada Lovelace. He opened additional studios at the Colosseum, Regent’s Park (1847-1851) and in 1851 he moved his entire business to 107 Regent Street, where he established what he called a “Temple to Photography.”
It has been estimated that he made 1,800 pictures every year with subjects including Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage. His daguerreotype of Hemi Pomara, in the National Library of Australia, is the oldest known photograph of any Māori person.
In 1848 he produced the photographometer, an instrument designed to measure the intensity of photogenic rays; and in 1849 he brought out the focimeter, for securing a perfect focus in photographic portraiture.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and in 1858 he produced the stereomonoscope, in reply to a challenge from Sir David Brewster.
Claudet received many honours, among which was the appointment, in 1853, as “Photographer-in-ordinary” to Queen Victoria, and the award, ten years later, of an honor from Napoleon III of France.
Antoine Claudet (French, 1797-1867) (18 King William St Strand) Portrait of seated man and woman c. 1850 Half-plate daguerreotype with applied colour in stamped leather case Courtesy of a Private Collection
Claudet learned photography from Louis Daguerre in the late 1830s, and established his first daguerreotype studio in London in 1841 behind St Martin-in-the-Fields church, receiving honours from both Queen Victoria and Napoleon III for his skills as a photographer. However, he is best known for his experiments with photographic instruments and his chemical experiments, which succeeded in speeding up the photographic process.
Unfortunately horrid
François Arago, in a report to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris on 3 July 1839, warned that touching the surface of a daguerreotype was like ‘brushing the wings of a butterfly’. This fragility is demonstrated in an 1852 group portrait of Queen Victoria and her family. Apparently, Victoria had been captured with her eyes closed. So, she scratched out her face on the plate in a blizzard of annoyance, leaving herself decapitated but the children unblemished. Despite this experience, Victoria and Albert were enthusiastic patrons of photography.
This group portrait of Queen Victoria with her five eldest children was taken in January 1852 by William Edward Kilburn, who, as one of the leading photographers in London, was commissioned to photograph the Royal family on a number of occasions. The Queen was portrayed with her eyes closed, which is why she wiped out her face on the plate, but spared the images of the children.
“Went back to the Gardens, where a Daguerreotype by Mr. Kilburn was taken of me & 5 of the children. The day was splendid for it. Mine was unfortunately horrid, but the children’s were pretty.”
Hand-coloured daguerreotype of Prince Albert, seated and facing partly right. His left arm rests on the arm of the chair and his right rests on his lap. He is wearing a beige jacket and a dark brown waistcoat. The background is painted blue with white clouds and the daguerreotype is mounted under glass. On the reverse there is a label reading ‘The Prince from Life 1848’, handwritten by Queen Victoria. Prince Albert was an early enthusiast of photography and closely followed the development of the medium. In February 1847 Kilburn showed examples of his coloured daguerreotypes, made by adding fine coloured powders to the photographic plate, to the Society of Arts. In 1848 Prince Albert commissioned a portrait using the new technique. This is one of two surviving hand-coloured daguerreotypes produced from the sitting. Commissioned by Prince Albert in 1848
By the mid-1840s, it was common for middle-class British citizens to have a daguerreotype portrait made. Often, these were enhanced with applied colour, giving a touch of life to an otherwise monochrome medium.
Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) Portrait bust of a man c. 1845 Hand-painted daguerreotype in vertical leather case Courtesy of a Private Collection
Richard Beard was a businessman who purchased a licence to use the daguerreotype process in 1841 and opened the world’s first photographic studio. It was set up in a glasshouse on the roof of London’s Royal Polytechnic Institution to provide all-round lighting necessary to the daguerreotype process. There were huge profits from his studios in London and Liverpool and from the sale of licences to take daguerreotypes, but Beard was ruined by his many legal actions against rivals, and went bankrupt in 1850.
Itinerant and transnational
The career of James William Newland exemplifies the itinerant, transnational character of many early photographers. Born in Suffolk in about 1810, Newland opened his first daguerreotype studio in 1845 in New Orleans in the USA. He subsequently travelled throughout Central and South America and then across the Pacific to Sydney, Australia. In 1848, he established a studio there and exhibited 200 daguerreotypes he had taken during his journey. After Australia, he headed back to England for a brief visit, before moving to India to set up a studio in Calcutta. It was there that he died, killed during the Indian Uprising of 1857.
J.W. Newland (English, c. 1810-1857) Portrait of a standing man, Calcutta c. 1855 Quarter-plate daguerreotype in leather case with red velvet pad Courtesy of a Private Collection
Photo journalism
This daguerreotype records the immense crowds at one of the Chartist rallies held in South London in 1848. Calling for political reform, the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order. Fears were so great, the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family was moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. In the event, the rally passed peacefully, and Prince Albert himself purchased this record of it.
Studio of William Edward Kilburn (English, 1818-1881) (234 Regent St, London) The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, 10 April 1848 10 April 1848 Daguerreotype Royal Collection, London
Daguerreotype of a large crowd of supporters of the Chartist movement gathered together on Kennington Common. At the centre of the crowd there is a platform for the speakers, and a number of people hold banners and flags. Behind the crowd there is a tall factory chimney and a large house to the right. In the foreground a man stands facing the crowds in a horse-drawn cart. The daguerreotype is mounted under glass.
This daguerreotype records the immense crowds at one of the Chartist rallies held in South London in 1848. Calling for political reform, and spurred on by the recent February Revolution in France, the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order. Fears were so great that on the eve of the meeting, the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family were moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. In the event the rally passed peacefully. Prince Albert later spoke about his concern for the working classes at a meeting of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes, 18 May 1848. This is one of a pair of daguerreotypes of the event acquired by Prince Albert.
One of a pair of daguerreotypes of the Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common purchased by Prince Albert in 1848
Although his opinion of photography evolved over the years, John Ruskin was initially enthusiastic about the daguerreotype, importing early examples from France and learning the process himself in order to make photographic sketches of architecture and landscape.
“Daguerreotypes taken by this vivid sunlight are glorious things. It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself: every chip of stone and stain is there, and of course there is no mistake about proportions… It is a noble invention.”
~ John Ruskin, in a letter to his father from Venice, 7 October 1845
John Ruskin (English, 1819-1900) and John Hobbs (?) View of the façade of a building in Venice c. 1850 Daguerreotype History of Science Museum, University of Oxford Minn Collection Bequeathed by Henry Minn in 1961
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin’s writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is “truth to nature”. From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly “letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain”, published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871-1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.
This stereo-daguerreotype includes a selection of the instruments found in the studio of London photographer Antoine Claudet in 1853. They include a focimeter (a device of his own devising that aided focus), a distillation device hanging on the back wall, a telescope on a stand, an upside-down globe, an array of chemical jars and glass vessels, a centrifugal force speed controller, a photographometer (an early kind of light metre), three different kinds of stereoscope, the Post Office London Directory of 1852, a magnifying glass, a slide rule, a glass prism, a French treatise on photography, two of his dynactinometers (another device of his own invention), a mortar and pestle, and an apothecary’s scales.
Photographs of paintings
Daguerreotypes were used to make records of paintings and prints. Sometime in the 1850s, the studio of London-based photographer Edward Kilburn was commissioned to make a daguerreotype of a painting then thought to be by Raphael. The client was the British art dealer Morris Moore. Moore engaged in a decades-long struggle to have this painting, now titled Apollo and Marsyas and attributed to Perugino, accepted as an early work by Raphael. This daguerreotype no doubt played a part in that campaign. Moore displayed it, for example, in Berlin in 1856.
Keepsake and memory
Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and computing pioneer, had a number of daguerreotype portraits made of herself. The last of these, taken by an unknown photographer, is of a small painted portrait of Lovelace. Frail and thin and suffering from cancer, she is shown sitting at her piano. Shortly before she died, Lovelace wrote a note in which she leaves ‘a daguerreotype from Philips’s picture of me’ to her mother’s friend, a Mary Millicent Montgomery.
Photographer unknown (English) Copy of an 1852 painting of Ada Lovelace by Henry Wyndam Phillips 13 August 1852 Daguerreotype Private Collection Reproduction courtesy of Geoffrey Bond Public domain
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.
2th Sept 1852 I leave to my Mother’s oldest Friend, Mary Millicent Mont= =gomery, three articles, viz: 1. A Red Cornelian Brooch which I have much used I have much used, & to which I desire my Hair to be added; 2. A Daguerreotype from Philip’s Picture of me; 3. 4 Books printed out by me. I request this Paper also to be given to Mary Millicent Mont= =gomery; & I wish her to understand that I leave her …
As well as being customers of the new photographers, Ada Lovelace and her circle were intrigued by the science of photography and the contribution photographic processes might make to science. Apart from her famous paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, her only other known publication is in the form of long footnotes to an article by her husband, William Earl of Lovelace, in the Royal Agricultural Society journal. The article, which he describes as being written for the ‘leather-gaiter-and-top-boot-mind’, reviews a paper by the French economist Gasparin, about possible laws linking climate and the yield of crops, referring to a wide variety of observations of weather and plants collected by both professionals and amateurs. Ada Lovelace observes that photographic devices, such as the actinograph designed by her friend John Herschel, allow the construction of ‘meteorological instruments of the utmost delicacy’, and criticises Gasparin ‘who seems to write unaware of the means which photography has offered’.
In similar vein, she reflected on the potential of photography in providing objective evidence of psychic phenomena. In an unpublished article she writes, ‘If amateurs, of either sex, would amuse their idle hours with experimenting on this subject, & would keep an accurate journal of their daily observations, we should in a few years have a mass of registered facts to compare with the observation of the Scientific’, concluding that ‘we believe that it is as yet quite unsuspected how important a part photography is to play in the advancement of human knowledge’.
A third poignant daguerreotype, by an unknown photographer, is a photograph of a small portrait of Ada Lovelace, frail and thin, painted by Henry Wyndham Phillips in the last months of her life, when she was in great pain from uterine cancer. Her husband recorded progress on the portrait in his diary – on 2 August ‘she managed to remain long enough when he came for him to make some progress’, on 3 August that he was ‘getting on with the portrait’, and on 13 August that though ‘the suffering was so great that she could scarce avoid crying out’, yet ‘she sat at the piano some little time so that the artist could portray her hands’. The Bodleian archives contain a note written in her last days, in which she leaves ‘a daguerreotype from Philips’s portrait of me’ to her mother’s friend, Miss Montgomery.
George Hollis (British, 1793-1842) (engraver) Mr Couldock as Richard III 1851 From Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes Hand-coloured steel engraving after daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington
This engraving: The British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection
Celebrity actors
Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes offered a series of engraved copies of daguerreotype portraits of celebrated Shakespearean actors. Sometimes these actors are shown as if in a portrait studio, but more often they are posing in costume (and even in blackface), as if in the midst of a performance. The series is a reminder of the popularity of the theatre and actors in the mid-19th century (even Queen Victoria bought a copy of this publication), but also of the casual racism that was part of everyday British life.
Engraver unknown (British) Mr Charles Kean as Hamlet 1851 From Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes Steel engraving after daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington
This engraving: The British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection
‘Mr Ira Aldridge as Aaron in Titus Andronicus’ From Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes c. 1851 Steel engraving after daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Ira Aldridge
Born in New York, Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) was an African-American actor, playwright, and theatre manager. From 1824, the year he emigrated to the UK, Aldridge made his career largely on the London stage and in Europe. He became well known as a performer in plays by Shakespeare, including roles usually played by white actors, such as Richard III, King Lear and Macbeth. Aldridge’s career took off at the height of the movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. He chose to play a number of anti-slavery roles and often addressed his audiences on closing night, speaking passionately about the injustice of slavery.
The Great Exhibition
Six million people – equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time – visited the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, an international showcase for goods, raw materials and industrial products and machinery. It took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October in 1851. Photographs were among the thousands of exhibits, but the Great Exhibition was itself much photographed, as evidenced in the many photographic images reproduced in the illustrated press.
“Today is sunshine and mild weather. I peeped in thro’ a window at the East End of the Crystal palace, and found myself in the territories of the United States, who ought rather to have been located in the Far West of the building. The perspective looked beautiful.”
~ William Henry Fox Talbot, in a letter to his wife Constance, 30 April 1851
Engravers unknown (English) The Great Exhibition: The east nave, viewed from the south-western gallery 1851 From Illustrated London News, 6 September 1851, p. 296 Stipple and line engraving from daguerreotype by William Edward Kilburn 210 x 270 mm Courtesy of a Private Collection
Held at Crystal Palace in London in 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was one of the most influential cultural events of the 19th century and the Illustrated London New did not fail to record its scale and significance using an equally influential invention that would shape the current century and those to come.
Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-1865) began his career as a gardener’s boy, eventually becoming head gardener for the Duke of Devonshire. He remodelled the Duke’s gardens at Chatsworth and Chiswick, designing large glass and iron conservatories for them. These later became the model for his design of the Great Exhibition building, now known as the Crystal Palace, for which he received his knighthood. After this success, Paxton continued to work on landscape gardening and public parks as well as designing various country houses. Published by Peter Jackson, London.
Sir Joseph Paxton (English, 1801-1865)
Sir Joseph Paxton, (born Aug. 3, 1801, near Woburn, Bedfordshire, Eng. – died June 8, 1865, Sydenham, near London), English landscape gardener and designer of hothouses, who was the architect of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.
He was originally a gardener employed by the duke of Devonshire, whose friend, factotum, and adviser he became. From 1826 he was superintendent of the gardens at Chatsworth, the duke’s Derbyshire estate; he built in iron and glass the famous conservatory there (1840) and the lily house for the duke’s rare Victoria regia (1850). Also in 1850, after a cumbersome design had been officially accepted by the Great Exhibition’s organisers, Paxton’s inspired plan for a building of prefabricated elements of sheet glass and iron was substituted. His design, based on his earlier glass structures, covered four times the area of St. Peter’s, Rome, and the grandeur of its conception was a challenge to mid-19th-century technology. Although it was built within six months and he was knighted for his efforts (1851), it was not until later that the structure was seen as a revolution in style. In 1852-1854 its components were moved to Sydenham Hill in Upper Norwood, where they remained (reerected in a different form from the original) until destroyed by fire in 1936.
Paxton was a member of Parliament for Coventry from 1854 until his death. During the period of his glass structures, he also designed many houses in eclectic styles and laid out a number of public parks.
Kathleen Kuiper. “Sir Joseph Paxton,” on the Britannica website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023
Joseph John Jenkins (English, 1811-1885) (engraver) Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace c. 1851 Stipple and line engraving from daguerreotype by William Edward Kilburn
This engraving: from the Britannica website
The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection
Joseph John Jenkins (1811 – 9 March 1885) was a British engraver and watercolour painter. He is best known for his portraits and landscapes paintings.
Jenkins engraved many portraits, and among other works, Susanna and the Elders, after Francesco Mola, and The Greenwich Pensioner and The Chelsea Pensioner, after Michael William Sharp. He engraved plates and drew illustrations for the annuals, such as The Keepsake and Heath’s Book of Beauty, Plates from his drawings are in Charles Heath’s Illustrations to Byron and similar works.
Grand Panorama
The Illustrated London News issued a commemorative Grand Panorama of the Great Exhibition of All Nations 1851 in its December issue. Comprising fold-out pages, each sheet was based on daguerreotypes of the interior of the Exhibition taken by an operator from the Beard studio. The panorama showed frontal views of each side of the interior of the Crystal Palace, with distinct sections suitably captioned and clusters of figures added to give interest to an otherwise drab set of facades.
Commodities and things
The taking of photographs inside the building was restricted to between 6 and 9 am, before it opened to the public, or on Sundays, when it was otherwise closed. Often, the resulting views are undemonstrative and frontal, even if they are also sometimes animated by the engraver through the addition of figures peering at the exhibits. These scenes confirm the fetishisation of the commodity that was the Great Exhibition’s singular attraction, turning that spectacle into a picture to be gazed at in its turn.
John Tallis (English, 1817-1876) and Jacob George Strutt (British, 1790-1864) Tallis’s history and description of the Crystal Palace, and the exhibition of the world’s industry in 1851 (p. 13) 1852 Steel engravings, from original drawings and daguerreotypes by Beard and Mayall studios
The Swedish Nightingale
Prizes were awarded to photographers whose displays at the Great Exhibition were considered to be particularly notable. One of those prizes was awarded to Edward Kilburn. The jury was particularly impressed by a full-length daguerreotype portrait made by Kilburn in 1848 of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale. Lind is posed so that her image is reflected in a large mirror; ‘that the reflection in the glass is equally perfect with the original is the point worthy of remark and commendation’.
“… a masterpiece of this art, not excelled, if equalled, by any other specimen exhibited throughout the entire building.”
Daguerreotype of a full length portrait of Jenny Lind standing beside a piano, facing away from the camera, with her head and upper body turned left towards the camera. Her right hand rests on the top of the piano and her left hand is touching the keys. She is wearing a long dress and a dark colour lace shawl. The mirror on the wall to the right reflects her back and there is an ornate side table beneath it. The daguerreotype is mounted under glass.
Queen Victoria attended the first London performance given by the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind on the 4th of May 1847. She described the occasion in her journal: ‘The great event of the evening however was Jenny Lind’s appearance & her complete triumph. She has the most exquisite, powerful, & really quite peculiar voice’. She later sang among the choristers at the wedding of the Prince of Wales in St George’s Chapel in 1863.
William Kilburn exhibited several daguerreotypes at the 1851 Great Exhibition, with this image being particularly well received. The exhibition jury commented: ‘For novelty of design we may mention a small picture of the interior of a room, including a whole-length portrait of Jenny Lind: beside, and near her, is a large mirror, in which the figure is reflected. That the reflection in the glass is equally perfect with the original is the point worthy of remark and commendation’.
The daguerreotype was also reproduced with significant cropping in carte-de-visite format, such as in the example today kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (Museum Number S.138:66-2007). Acquired by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1849.
Anonymous. “Jenny Lind (1820-1887),” on the Royal Collection Trust website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023
Really marvellous
Stuffed frogs being shaved and promenading under an umbrella were among the most remarkable of the exhibits daguerreotyped by the Claudet studio at the Great Exhibition. The animals were prepared for anthropomorphic display by Hermann Ploucquert, a taxidermist at the Royal Museum in Stuttgart. The stall at which these creations were exhibited was apparently perpetually surrounded by a crowd. Queen Victoria herself described them in her diaries as ‘really marvellous’. Claudet’s images were issued as a book of coloured wood engravings titled The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg.
News from home
The dissemination of engravings after daguerreotypes in the Illustrated London News meant that photographic images became itinerant entities. Distributed all over the world, the same image was capable of being experienced, simultaneously, in – say – Sydney, Hong Kong, Calcutta, New York, and London. By 1851, when Harden Melville completed the painting that this coloured engraving commemorates – titled Australia: News from Home – even settlers in outback Australia were able to get copies. One of them is looking at an issue of the Illustrated London News that celebrates the opening of the Great Exhibition in London.
Official reports
Not one of the many photographs exhibited in the Great Exhibition was by William Henry Fox Talbot, England’s claimant to the medium’s invention. Nevertheless, Talbot’s calotype process was chosen to illustrate the official reports on the event, even if the majority of these illustrations was shot and printed by French photographers rather than English ones. The other claimant to photography’s invention, the Frenchman Louis Daguerre, lived long enough to read about London’s Great Exhibition but died two months after it opened. Fittingly, his obituary in the Illustrated London News was accompanied by a wood-engraved portrait based on a daguerreotype.
The Duke of Wellington
The Ryall engraving faithfully imitates the composition and details of the daguerreotype made by the Claudet studio, but reverses the orientation of the Duke’s body. A story in the Illustrated London News, published on 13 November 1852, tells us that the Duke himself was not particularly impressed by the print. Apparently, ‘he looked at it for a moment, shook his head, and, with a half smile and half frown of recognition, muttered “Very old! Hum!” and turned away in thought’. This engraving was in turn copied by others, reappearing in a variety of media over the next few decades, and especially in 1852, the year of Wellington’s death.
Edward J. Pickering, for studio of Antoine Claudet (London) Portrait of the Duke of Wellington 1 May 1844 Daguerreotype
This image: Getty Public domain
Image in the exhibition: Wellington Collection, Stratfield Saye House
John Sartain (English, 1808-1897) The Duke of Wellington 1852 Mezzotint, etching and aquatint engraving (‘engraved by J. Sartain after Claudet’s portrait’) 7 x 4 15/16 in. (17.78 x 12.54cm)
This engraving: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Bequest of Dr. Paul J. Sartain Public domain
The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection
Salt prints
In September 1840, William Henry Fox Talbot discovered how to greatly increase his photographic paper’s sensitivity to light. This new process produced a latent image which remained invisible to the eye until it was developed for a second time. The result was a sharp negative from which numerous positive salt prints could be made. Resisting his mother’s entreaty to call this process ‘Talbotype’, after himself, he gave it the more modest name of ‘calotype’ (‘beautiful picture’). Other photographers soon took up this new process, including Welshman Calvert Richard Jones and the Scottish duo of David Hill and Robert Adamson.
“A better picture can now be obtained in a minute than by the former process in an hour.”
~ William Henry Fox Talbot, in a letter to the Literary Gazette, 13 February 1841
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Lace Early 1840s Salt print from a calotype negative 22.7 x 18.7cm
Rev. Calvert Richard Jones (Welsh, 1804-1877) Colosseum, Rome, 2nd view 1846 Salt print (printed by Nicolaas Henneman) from a calotype negative
This image: Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Image in the exhibition: MS. WHF Talbot photogr. 6
The Reverend Calvert Richard Jones was the son of a landowner from Wales. He became a marine painter, draftsman, and daguerreotypist before turning to the calotype, the negative/positive paper process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot, with whom Jones occasionally photographed. During travels to Italy in 1841, Jones stopped in France, where he met and photographed with Hippolyte Bayard, the French inventor of direct positive prints on paper. Through Jones, Bayard and Talbot were introduced to each other and their respective pioneering processes.
Jones was enthusiastic about the creative possibilities of photography. He used the photographic panorama, a device that provided the viewer with a wide-angle view of a given scene. His body of work includes marine landscapes and genre portraits of local men and women at work and leisure, as well as travel landscapes of Italy and France. After 1856 Jones apparently gave up photography, although he continued to paint.
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Loch Katrine 1844 Salt print (printed by Nicolaas Henneman) from a calotype negative
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1802-1870 and Scottish, 1821-1848) Portrait of James Inglis 2 October 1844 Salt print from a calotype negative History of Science Museum, University of Oxford Presented by Sir John R. Findlay in 1929
Calotype (salted paper print from a calotype negative) of James Inglis, a doctor from Halifax, seated nearly three-quarter length, head very nearly in profile looking left, a leather glove on his left hand; photographed at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at York in 1844. Mostly greenish sepia, pale at edges, retaining the original brown only at centre; discolouration mark from juxtaposed paper on back. For fuller descriptive and historical commentary see narratives.
David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848)
Brewster, sensing that Hill’s intention to sketch each of the several hundred ministers before they returned to the far corners of Scotland would be close to impossible, suggested that the painter use the services of the newly established Adamson to make photographic sketches instead. “I got hold of the artist,” Brewster wrote to Talbot in early June, “showed him the Calotype, & the eminent advantage he might derive from it in getting likenesses of all the principal characters before they were dispersed to their respective homes. He was at first incredulous, but went to Mr. Adamson, and arranged with him preliminaries for getting all the necessary portraits.” Within weeks Hill was completely won over, and the two were working seamlessly in partnership. As artistic director, Hill composed each picture, placing his sitters as they might appear in the finished painting.
Adamson operated the camera and carried out the chemical manipulations. Hill and Adamson were a perfect team. Hill, twenty years older than Adamson, was trained as a painter and had important connections in artistic and social circles in Edinburgh; he easily attracted a distinguished clientele to the team’s portrait studio at Adamson’s home, Rock House. Most of all, he possessed a geniality, a “suavity of manner and absence of all affectation,” that immediately set people at ease and permitted him to pose his sitters without losing their natural sense of posture and expression. Adamson was young but had learned his lessons well. He was a consummate technician, excelling in – and even improving upon – the various optical and chemical procedures developed by Talbot. Both men had a profound understanding of the way the world would translate into monochrome pictures.
If in May Hill had been incredulous, by June he was convinced; by July he was proud to exhibit the first photographs as “preliminary studies and sketches” for his picture, and by the end of the year he and his partner had photographed nearly all the figures who would have a place in his grand painting. Their hundreds of preparatory “sketches” ranged from single portraits to groups of as many as twenty-five ministers posed as Hill envisioned them in his ambitious composition. Some portraits, such as that of Thomas Chalmers, first moderator of the Free Church, were used as direct models for the finished work. However, at each sitting, Hill and Adamson made numerous photographs in various poses, and many photographs of the ministers have no direct correspondence with the painting. Still other portraits, of people who were not present for the signing of the Deed of Demission – but whom Hill apparently thought should have been – were used as models for the painting.
“The pictures produced are as Rembrandt’s but improved,” wrote the watercolorist John Harden on first seeing Hill and Adamson’s calotypes in November 1843, “so like his style & the oldest & finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting & effect must be the consequence.” In actuality, though, it was so easy to make the portrait “sketches” by means of photography that Hill’s painting was ultimately overburdened by a surfeit of recognizable faces: 450 names appear on his key to the painting. The final composition – not completed for two decades and as dull a work as one can imagine – lacks not only the fiery dynamism of Hill’s first sketches of the event but also the immediacy and graphic power of the photographs that were meant to serve it.
By August 1844, Hill and Adamson clearly understood the value of their calotypes as works of art in their own right and decided to expand their collaboration far beyond the original mission, announcing a forthcoming series of volumes illustrated with photographs of subjects other than the ministers of the Free Church: The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth; Highland Character and Costume; Architectural Structures of Edinburgh; Architectural Structures of Glasgow, &c.; Old Castles, Abbeys, &c. in Scotland; and Portraits of Distinguished Scotchmen. Although these titles were never issued as published volumes, photographs intended for each survive, and those made in the small fishing town of Newhaven are a particularly noteworthy group.
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) An Ancient Door in Magdalen College, Oxford April 1843 Salted paper print from paper negative Dimensions overall: 18.8 x 22.7cm (7 3/8 x 8 15/16 in.)
This image: National Gallery of Art, Robert B. Menschel Fund CC0 1.0 Universal
Image in the exhibition: MS. WHF Talbot photogr. 4, item 3
A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 is made possible through the generosity of donors and lenders. In particular the Bodleian Libraries would like to thank: Professor Raymond Dwek CBE FRS and Mrs Sandra Dwek Sir Brian and Lady Pomeroy Ian and Caroline Laing Lenders His Majesty King Charles III Blackie House Library and Museum, Edinburgh The Trustees of the British Museum English Heritage Trust Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge Victoria and Albert Museum The Wellington Collection, Stratfield Saye House Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford History of Science Museum, University of Oxford Oxford University Museum of Natural History The President and Fellows of Magdalen College The Provost and Fellows of Oriel College The Principal and Fellows of Somerville College Geoffrey Batchen G C Bond K & J Jacobson Gregory Page-Turner William Zachs
We would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity for the loans and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity. We are also grateful to those whose skill and labour have made this exhibition possible.
A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 exhibition poster
Exhibition dates: 29th November, 2022 – 30th April, 2023
Curators: Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova and Olena Kashuba-Volvach
Davyd Burliuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1967) Landscape 1912 Oil on canvas 33 x 46, 3cm Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Revelation and resistance
This exhibition presents ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century… in an act of ‘revelatio’, or pulling aside of the curtain to reveal what has been hidden from view in Europe for too many years.
The brief flowering of modern Ukrainian art that took place from roughly 1910s to 1933 was savagely cut short by Stalin’s purges of artists and intellectuals “in the length and breadth of the USSR, but in Ukraine repression started earlier and had a character all its own. In Russia at large, repressed artists and writers were classified as ‘enemies of people’, a broad and generic term. In Ukraine, they were accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, an altogether more emotive and destructive appellation. The scene was set, and the destruction of Ukrainian literature and art from 1931 onwards amounted to nothing less than mass cultural genocide.”
Many artists were either sent to the Gulag (labour camps), executed (such as the followers of Mykhalio Boichuk known as Boichukists with most of their public art subsequently destroyed) or had to adapt and tow the party line, their artistic activity cut short by a radical change in the political climate. “Art was increasingly viewed through a prism of ‘class consciousness’ and Soviet subject matter came to dominate all spheres of artistic output. In 1932, Socialist Realism was introduced as the only official artistic style to be practiced in the Soviet Union, with more value subsequently placed on the rally-like qualities in art rather than the merits of modernist experimentation.”
But as history shows us, dictatorships don’t last. As much as Stalin wanted to destroy the expression of a nascent Ukrainian modernism, a true renaissance of creative experimentation, he failed… for Stalin died and the USSR crumbled. This magnificent art remains.
And so a modern day dictator who has invaded a free Ukraine, who suppresses all opposition in his own country so ruthlessly and cruelly, will be washed with the tide of history. His secular power is vain compared to the desire for freedom… and the creativity and imagination needed to express that freedom.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“We wanted to do something in terms of showing Ukrainian art, but also taking Ukrainian art out of Ukraine and bringing it to Europe and to safety.”
Katia Denysova (curator)
Cubo-Futurism
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right, Davyd Burliuk’s Ukrainian Peasant Woman 1910-1911
Davyd Burliuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1967) Ukrainian Peasant Woman 1910-1911 Oil on canvas 132 x 70cm Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at left, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné’s Adam and Eve 1912; and at second right, El Lissitzky’s Composition 1918-1920s
Installation views of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing in the top image, three paintings by Alexandra Exter including at left, Three Female Figures (1910) and at right Still Life (1915); and at centre in the bottom image, El Lissitzky’s Composition 1918-1920s
Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné (Ukrainian, 1888-1944) Adam and Eve 1912 Oil on canvas 155 x 219.7cm Colección Carmen Thyssen
Vladimir Davidovich Baranov-Rossiné (Ukrainian: Володимир Давидович Баранов-Росіне, Russian: Владимир Давидович Баранов-Россине) (13 January 1888, Velyka Lepetykha – 1944, Auschwitz) was a Ukrainian painter and sculptor active in France. Baranov-Rossiné was of Jewish origin. His work belonged to the avant-garde movement of Cubo-Futurism. He was also an inventor.
Born in Kherson, Ukraine, in 1888, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné spent his life and career between imperial Russia and Paris. After studying in Odesa and St Petersburg, he exhibited in early avant-garde exhibitions held in Moscow and St Petersburg, alongside Mijaíl Lariónov, Natalia Goncharova, Alexandra Exter and the Burliuk brothers, among others. He also participated in an important exhibition in Kyiv in 1908 devoted to the synthesis between painting, sculpture, poetry and music. An intense interest in the idea of a synthesis of the arts, a legacy of Russian Symbolism, would remain with Baranoff-Rossiné all his life.
In 1910, he left for Paris where, aside from frequenting the circles of artists from the Russian empire, he was particularly friendly with Hans Arp and Robert and Sonia Delaunay. His colourful paintings of the period show an assimilation of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants. At the same time, he experimented with sculpture, executing two large openwork assemblage sculptures created from fragments of painted metal, wood and found objects. One of these sculptures, exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, provoked such consternation and ridicule that he later threw it into the Seine. Only the French critic Guillaume Apollinaire understood its radical and prescient expressive idiom, comparable to the early ‘sculpto-paintings’ produced by fellow Ukrainian Alexander Archipenko.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Baranoff-Rossiné moved to Norway, where he would remain until 1917, when he went back to Russia. Between 1917 and 1925, his production was prolific; he exhibited alongside Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Yurii Annenkov and other representatives of the Soviet avant-garde, and taught painting. At the same time, he explored his earlier interest in a synthesis of the arts, inventing a ‘colour-clavier’ and presenting ‘optophonic’ concerts in Moscow theatres, in which, as the piano’s keys were played, the music was ‘translated’ by coloured disks projected on a screen.
Baranoff-Rossiné returned to settle in Paris in 1925. He continued to paint in a more Surrealist manner, made a few sculptures, and experimented with materials, colours and sounds, exhibiting regularly in the Parisian Salons. His works may be found in many public collections, including those of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1943 he was arrested in France by the Gestapo and deported. He died in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Poland) in 1944.
Margit Rowell. “Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné,” on the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza website Nd [Online] Cited 23/03/2023
Oleksandr Bohomazov (Ukrainian, 1880-1930) Landscape, Locomotive 1914-1915 Oil on canvas 33 x 41cm European private collection
Alexander Bogomazov or Oleksandr Bohomazov (Ukrainian: Олександр Костянтинович Богомазов; March 27, 1880 – June 3, 1930) was a Ukrainian painter, cubo-futurist, modern art theoretician and is recognised as one of the key figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde scene. In 1914, Oleksandr wrote his treatise The Art of Painting and the Elements. In it he analyzed the interaction between Object, Artist, Picture, and Spectator and sets the theoretical foundation of modern art. During his artistic life Oleksandr Bohomazov mastered several art styles. The most known are Cubo-Futurism (1913-1917) and Spectralism (1920-1930). …
Cubo-Futurism Period, 1913-1915
Years of 1913-14 became a time of the artist’s intense search for ways to develop “new art”. In September 1914, Bohomazov finished the theoretical work “Painting and Its Elements”, which summarised his reflections on the nature of creativity and its components. The works belonging to the year 1913 were created by Bohomazov, when the main provisions included in his theoretical work had not yet been thought out and formulated, but the style and form-creating elements of these works testify that the master was already familiar with various artistic directions of avant-garde art, in particular and with the futuristic concept of displaying the state of the environment through the demonstration of the movement of the objects that made it.
In the works of this time, he intuitively, rather than consciously, uses a number of techniques that enhance the feeling of movement and convey the dynamism of the depicted object. So, for example, he actively uses a bundle of straight lines that converge and, in turn, form certain ray- and fan-like forms that create a powerful effect of movement. At the same time, the artist often uses such a technique as extending straight lines along their entire length and turning them into needle-like guides, as, for example, in the work “Train”.
The alternation of saturated sharp spots with unfilled empty spaces became for him another means of enriching the artistic language of the works. In a number of works, the artist arranges the forms he uses diagonally and at an angle to the borders of the picture plane. This technique is clearly visible in his painting “Train. Boyarka”. This method of constructing the picture plane makes it possible to create the impression of intense dynamic tension and convey the feeling of movement, regardless of whether it is connected to a specific object or insinuates itself. In the works of 1913, the artist pays a lot of attention to a straight line or a group of straight lines, which together create irregular dynamic impulses.
1914 can be considered a turning point in the artist’s work. And not only because the artist finally formulated his ideas about the art of the “New Age” in a theoretical treatise, but also because this year he established himself as an original artist. In 1914, Bohomazov began to consciously use all techniques in the reproduction of nature and its state, which had intuitively matured in previous works. He actively implements the new principles declared in ‘Painting and Its Elements’.
In the works of this year, we observe the artist’s interest in combining simple flat forms into more complex spatial objects. Bohomazov begins to understand: the planes and straight lines that form them limit the possibility of conveying the dynamism of the object – and he introduces new elements into his artistic lexicon, including various arc-shaped lines.
He also resorts to another new technique – mosaic toning of individual components, that is, fragmentary strengthening of forms, and this gives them a stronger sense of dynamism. At the same time, the structure of the picture alternates with forms with a mass of different saturation. Here we can note that this technique reflects the concept of interval formulated by the artist.
In 1914, he organised the exhibition Kiltse (“The Ring”) in Kyiv, where the works of 21 artists were exposed, among others Oleksandra Ekster, Eugène Konopatzky among others. For Bohomazov, this was the first significant exhibition, 88 of his works, mostly graphics, were presented there. Like Kandinsky during the second “Salon”, Bohomazov presented his theoretical work “The Essence of Four Elements”, in which he explained the principle of the new Cubo-Futurist art: the combination of line, colour, form and plane of the picture.
Kiltse was supposed to be the first in a series of exhibitions, but this did not go according to plan. Reviews in the press were positive (indicating the general acceptance of the “new art” in critical circles), but few. In fact, the exhibition was hardly noticed. After the failure of the “Ring”, significant avant-garde exhibitions were no longer held in Kyiv until the 20s.
Her painting studio in the attic at 27 Funduklievskaya Street, now Khmelnytsky Street, was a rallying stage for Kiev’s intellectual elite. In the attic in her studio there worked future luminaries of world decorative art Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky and P. Tchelitchew. There she was visited by poets and writers, such as Anna Akhmatova, Ilia Ehrenburg, and Osip Mandelstam, choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and dancer Elsa Kruger, as well as many artists Alexander Bogomazov, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, and students, such as Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich, Aleksei Kapler and Abraham Mintchine among many others. In 1908, she participated in an exhibition together with members of the group Zveno (Link) organized by David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk and others in Kiev.
Paris
In Paris, Aleksandra Ekster became personally acquainted with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who introduced her to Gertrude Stein.
Under the name Alexandra d’Exter she exhibited six works at the Salon de la Section d’Or, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, October 1912, with Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others.
In 1914, Exter participated in the Salon des Indépendants exhibitions in Paris, together with Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Vadym Meller, Sonia Delaunay-Terk and other French and Russian artists. In that same year, she participated with the “Russians” Archipenko, Koulbine and Rozanova in the International Futurist Exhibition in Rome. In 1915, she joined the group of avant-garde artists Supremus. Her friend introduced her to the poet Apollinaire, who took her to Picasso’s workshop. According to Moscow Chamber Theatre actress Alice Coonen, “In [Ekster’s] Parisian household there was a conspicuous peculiar combination of European culture with Ukrainian life. On the walls between Picasso and Braque paintings, there was Ukrainian embroidery; on the floor was a Ukrainian carpet, at the table they served clay pots, colorful majolica plates of dumplings.”
Russian avant-garde
Under the avant-garde umbrella, Ekster has been noted to be a suprematist and constructivist painter as well as a major influencer of the Art Deco movement.
While not confined within a particular movement, Ekster was one of the most experimental women of the avant-garde. Ekster absorbed from many sources and cultures in order to develop her own original style. In 1915-1916, she worked in the peasant craft cooperatives in the villages Skoptsi and Verbovka along with Kazimir Malevich, Yevgenia Pribylskaya, Natalia Davidova, Nina Genke, Liubov Popova, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova and others. Ekster later founded a teaching and production workshop (MDI) in Kiev (1918-1920). Alexander Tyshler, Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Kliment Red’ko, Tchelitchew, Shifrin, Nikritin worked there. Also during this period she was one of the leading stage designers of Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theatre.
In 1919, together with other avant-garde artists Kliment Red’ko and Nina Genke-Meller, she decorated the streets and squares of Kiev and Odessa in abstract style for Revolution Festivities. She worked with Vadym Meller as a costume designer in a ballet studio of the dancer Bronislava Nijinska.
In 1921, she became a director of the elementary course Color at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshop (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow, a position she held until 1924. Her work was displayed alongside that of other Constructivist artists at the 5×5=25 exhibition held in Moscow in 1921.
In the spring of 1924, Alexandra Exter travelled to Venice to take part in organising the 14th Venice Biennale. Most of the Ekster’s works were not exposed, but were part of the exhiibition catalogue. Yet, she also created a special painting inspired by Venice at the entrance hall on the second floor of the Soviet Pavilion. Several researches for this painting are now in international and private collections.
Revolutionising costume design
In line with her eclectic avant-garde-like style, Ekster’s early paintings strongly influenced her costume design as well as her book illustrations, which are scarcely noted. All of Ekster’s works, no matter the medium, stick to her distinct style. Her works are vibrant, playful, dramatic, and theatrical in composition, subject matter, and color. Ekster constantly stayed true to her composition aesthetic across all mediums. Furthermore, each medium only enhanced and influenced her work in other mediums.
With her assimilation of many different genres her essential futurist and cubist ideas was always in tandem with her attention to colour and rhythm. Ekster uses many elements of geometric compositions, which reinforce the core intentions of dynamism, vibrant contrasts, and free brushwork. Ekster stretched the dynamic intentions of her work across all mediums. Ekster’s theatrical works such as sculptures, costume design, set design, and decorations for the revolutionary festivals, strongly reflect her work with geometric elements and vibrant intentions.
Through her costume work, she experimented with the transparency, movement, and vibrancy of fabrics. Ekster’s movement of her brushstroke in her artwork is reflected in the movement of the fabric in her costumes. Ekster’s theatrical sets used multi-coloured dimensions and experimented with spatial structures. She continued with these experimental tendencies in her later puppet designs. With her experimentation across many mediums, Ekster started to take the concept of her costume designing and integrate it into everyday life. In 1921, Ekster’s work in fashion design began. Though her mass production designs were wearable, most of her fashion design was highly decorative and innovative, usually falling under the category of haute couture.
In 1923, she continued her work in many media in addition to collaborating with Vera Mukhina and Boris Gladkov in Moscow on the decor of the All Russian Exhibition pavilions.
Ukrainian folk influences
Thanks to the connections of her husband, Mykola Ekster, Aleksandra met Natalia Davydova, who had an estate with craftsmanship in Verbivtsi near Cherkasy. It was there that the artist, who is now considered a representative of European Cubism, Futurism, Ukrainian avant-garde, one of the founders of the Art Deco style, discovered Ukrainian folk art, that was one of the influences in her works. According to Georgy Kovalenko, a researcher of Aleksandra Ekster’s work, the time in Verbivka was the determining factor in the artist’s painting, her colourful poem and became a source of imagery: “She conducted real scientific expeditions in search of ancient peasant embroideries, liturgical sewing, and weaving items,” Kovalenko wrote in his monograph.
Ekster and Davydova with other researchers searched for folk motifs, reinterpreted them, modernized them and, together with Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavska, drew supremacist designs for embroideries on bags, pillows, carpets, and belts. Later, they created the Kiev handicraft society, and also presented embroideries from Verbivtsi at exhibitions in Kiev and European countries. In 1917, more than 400 works were exhibited in Moscow, from where they never returned.
El Lissitzky (Russian born Ukraine, 1890-1941) Composition 1918-1920s Oil on canvas 71 x 58 cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Theatre Design
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing the work of Vadym Meller
Vadym Meller (Ukrainian, 1884-1962) Sketch for choreographic movement “Masks” for Bronislava Nijinska’s School of Movements, Kyiv 1919 Watercolour on cardboard 60 x 43cm Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine
Vadym Meller or Vadim Meller, (Russian: Вадим Георгиевич Меллер; Ukrainian: Вадим Георгійович Меллер, 1884-1962) was a Ukrainian Soviet painter, avant-garde Cubist, Constructivist and Expressionist artist, theatrical designer, book illustrator, and architect. In 1925 he was awarded a gold medal for the scenic design of the Berezil’ theater in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Art Deco) in Paris. …
V. Meller became the leader of the Constructivism movement in Ukrainian theatre design. He worked in the National theatre as a chief artist until 1945. From 1925 onward, he also taught at the Kyiv Art Institute (KKHI) together with Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Bogomazov. Also in 1925, V. Meller became a member of the artists union Association of the Revolutionary Masters of Ukraine together with David Burliuk (co-founder), Alexander Bogomazov (co-founder), Vasiliy Yermilov, Victor Palmov, and Khvostenko-Khvostov.
The exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s presents the ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century, showcasing trends that range from figurative art to futurism and constructivism. The development of Ukrainian modernism took place against a complicated socio-political backdrop of collapsing empires, the First World War, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921), and the eventual creation of Soviet Ukraine. The ruthless Stalinist repressions against Ukrainian intelligentsia led to the execution of dozens of writers, theatre directors and artists, while the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932-1933, killed millions of Ukrainians.
Despite these tragic circumstances, Ukrainian art of the period lived through a true renaissance of creative experimentation. In the Eye of the Storm reclaims this essential – though little-known in the West – chapter of European modernism, displaying around 70 works in a full range of media, from oil paintings and sketches to collages and theatre designs. Following a strict chronological order, the show presents works by masters of Ukrainian modernism, such as Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Viktor Palmov, and Anatol Petrytskyi. Exploring the polyphony of styles and identities, the exhibition includes neo-Byzantine paintings by the followers of Mykhailo Boichuk and experimental works by members of the Kultur Lige, who sought to promote their vision of contemporary Ukrainian and Yiddish art, respectively. It features pieces by Kazymyr Malevych and El Lissitzky, quintessential artists of the international avant-garde who worked in Ukraine and left a significant imprint on the development of the national art scene. The exhibition also showcases artworks of internationally renowned artists who were born and started their careers in Ukraine but became famous abroad, among them Alexandra Exter, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, and Sonia Delaunay.
In the most comprehensive survey of Ukrainian modern art to date, with many works on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the State Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza celebrates the dynamism and diversity of the artistic scene in Ukraine, while safeguarding the country’s heritage during the inadmissible, present-day occupation of its territory by Russia. After its presentation in Madrid, the exhibition will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Acknowledgements
This exhibition has been made possible by the support of President Zelensky and the Office of the President of Ukraine. Also key is Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Ukrainian Minister of Culture, whose collaboration has enabled us to secure the exceptional loan of these works from a war-torn country.
We extend our gratitude to the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine for their generous loans, as well as to the private collectors who have collaborated.
Special thanks are due to Baroness Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, who has passionately and courageously promoted the project from the outset and facilitated the complex negotiations to bring these works to Spain.
The support of the PinchukArtCentre has also been notable.
Mention should likewise be made of the work and dedication of the curators Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova and Olena Kashuba-Volvach and their revealing essays that appear, together with those of other research scholars, in the magnificent edition published by Thames & Hudson.
This exhibition has been made a reality thanks to the support of Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museums for Ukraine, the Deputy Directorate-General for State Museums of the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage and Fine Arts (Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport), Mastercard, Omega Capital, SITspain and Hammam Al-Andalus, among others.
Text from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum website
Spotify playlist In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s
Katia Denysova, curator of the exhibition, selects a list of recent hits, contemporary classics and the carol “Carol of the Bells”, inspired by a Ukrainian folk song.
Davyd Burliuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1967) Carousel 1921 Oil on canvas 33 x 45.5cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
David Burliuk devoted his artistic practice – which spanned painting, poetry, drawing, and engraving – to the pursuit of the modern. Using bold typefaces, vibrant colors, and energetic brush strokes, Burliuk turned against the artistic conventions of the past, capturing Russian Futurism’s ideas of dynamism, innovation, and revolution, declared in the 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Burliuk and his Futurist compatriots challenged audiences to question the accepted ideals of aesthetics and beauty in the hope of developing a new and more forward-thinking world.1
Artists, like Burliuk, associated with Russian Futurism sought to both question and analyze – what they called “deconstruct” – established principles of art, including a classical attention to realism, balance, and natural subject matter. Explaining his methods, Burliuk wrote:
“deconstruction is the opposite of construction. a canon can be constructive. a canon can be deconstructive. construction can be shifted or displaced.”2
David Burliuk was born on January 21, 1882, in the Village of Riabushky in the Russian Empire, in what is now Ukraine. He exhibited an early affinity for creative art, beginning independent painting studies at the age of 10. By the end of the 19th century, Burliuk had enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, the first of four formal arts programs he would attend throughout his life. It was at the Moscow Academy of Fine Art, an institution in which Burliuk enrolled in 1910, that he began participating in exhibitions and collectives that questioned the conventional standards of beauty in art. During a time of significant industrialization and political change, movements such as the famed Der Blaue Reiter, a group Burliuk associated with in 1912, while he was in Munich, emphasized a shift away from the classical styles of the past, prioritizing the innovations of the future.
Between 1910 and 1913, Burliuk began to assemble artists and poets – including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Benedict Livshits, and Velimir Khlebnikov – to form a group that would become known as Gileia. Initially formed as a modern literary collective and founded on the principles proposed by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti‘s “Manifesto of Futurism,” Gileia and its members would quickly metamorphose into the Cubo-Futurists. Marked by graphic handling of subjects and unconventional editorial displays, the Cubo-Futurists were unwavering in pushing the boundaries of accepted aesthetics.
The Cubo-Futurist movement carved out a space for artists to explore the creative possibilities of the modern future that lay ahead. Unfortunately, by 1916 the First World War had taken its toll on the creative communities of Eastern Europe, and the group dissolved. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, political conflict forced many to search for safer havens, and in 1922 Burliuk settled in the United States. He continued creating works consistent with the style of Cubo-Futurism, now informed by the trauma and displacement of war.
Distressed by the turmoil in his homeland, Burliuk joined other displaced artists, including Alexander Bogomazov and Vadym Meller, in creating the New York-based Association of Revolutionary Masters of Ukraine in 1925. While continuing his artistic practice, he would spend much of his later life attempting to revisit his homeland, a pursuit that proved successful in 1956, when his petition to visit was granted by the Soviet government. David Burliuk passed away on January 15, 1967. His art is a testament to constant innovation and, as he wrote in a 1912 manifesto, “the new impending beauty of the self-valuable (self-creating) word.”
1/ Margit Rowell, Deborah Wye, and Jared Ash. The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002), p. 25.
2/ David Burliuk, “Cubism,” in John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 76.
Mykhailo Boichuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1937) Dairy Maid 1922-1923 Tempera on canvas 95 x 45cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Born in the region of Ternopil in Western Ukraine, Boichuk was educated in Krakiv, Munich, and Paris. It was in Paris that he established his first art school and where his “Neo-Byzantine” style gained critical acclaim. Later, Boichuk became a leading artist and art educator in 1920s Ukraine. However, he and his followers, called “Boichukists,” were brutally persecuted by the Soviet regime. Many of them, including Boichuk himself, were executed by the Soviet police in the 1930s, and most of their artworks were destroyed. In spite of this, the style of Boichukism became very influential in the twentieth-century Ukrainian art.
Boychuk was born in Romanivka, then in Austria-Hungary, and currently in Ternopil Oblast of Ukraine. He studied painting under Yulian Pankevych in Lviv, and subsequently in Kraków, where he graduated from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts in 1905. He also studied at fine arts academies in Vienna and Munich. In 1905, he had his work exhibited at the Latour Gallery in Lviv and in 1907, his work was exhibited in Munich. Between 1907 and 1910 he lived in Paris where, in 1909, he founded his own studio-school. In this period, he worked with and was influenced by Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis. He held an exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, featuring his and his students’ works on the revival of Byzantine art. The group of Ukrainian artists who studied and worked with him was known as the Boychukists. In 1910, Boychuk returned to Lviv, where he worked as a conservator at the National Museum. In 1911, he travelled to the Russian Empire, but, after World War I started, he was interned there as an Austrian citizen. After the war, Boychuk remained in Kyiv.
In 1917, he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, where he taught fresco and mosaic, and in 1920 was a rector. In 1925, he co-founded the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. At the time, he already performed a number of high-profile monumental works, and formed a school of monumental painters which existed until his death. The school included renowned artists such as his brother Tymofiy Boychuk and Ivan Padalka.
Due to the Great Purge, the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine was disestablished, and Boychuk was executed. His wife, Sofiia Nalepinska, also an artist, was executed several months after Boychuk.
Many of the works by Boychuk, which mainly involved frescoes and mosaics, were destroyed after he was executed. Even his paintings which were kept in museums of Lviv, were destroyed after World War II. The main projects carried out or coordinated by Boychuk and his school – which included his brother Tymofii Boichuk, Ivan Padalka, Vasyl Sedliar, Sofiia Nalepinska, Mykola Kasperovych, Oksana Pavlenko, Antonina Ivanova, Mykola Rokytsky, Kateryna Borodina, Oleksandr Myzin, Kyrylo Hvozdyk, Pavlo Ivanchenko, Serhii Kolos, Okhrym Kravchenko, Hryhorii Dovzhenko, Onufrii Biziukov, Mariia Kotliarevska, Ivan Lypkivsky, Vira Bura-Matsapura, Yaroslava Muzyka, Oleksandr Ruban, Olena Sakhnovska, Manuil Shekhtman, Mariia Trubetska, Kostiantyn Yeleva, and Mariia Yunak – are an important contribution to Ukrainian and world art.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right, the work of Anatol Petrytskyi including the painting Disabled (1924, below)
Ukrainian artists at the Venice Biennale
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at left, Anatol Petrytskyi’s Disabled (1924, below)
Anatol Petrytskyi (Ukrainian, 1895-1964) Disabled 1924 Oil on canvas
A native of Halychyna in western Ukraine, Mykhalio Boichuk completed his education in art academies of Vienna, Krakow, Munich and Paris. In late 1917, he established a fresco, mosaics and tempera studio at the newly founded Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv. Advocating for arts as a national treasure and not a mere commodity, Boichuk arrived at a synthesis of styles, drawing on Byzantine art, Italian pre-Renaissance frescoes and Ukrainian folk art. In the earl Soviety period, his studio emerged as a school of monumental art, with its students, henceforth known as Boichukists, completing numerous state commissions for public spaces and buildings. The collaboration proved short-lived, however: labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’, Boichuk and a close circle of his associates were executed during the Stalinist purge of the 1930s, with most of their public art subsequently destroyed.
Exhibition wall text
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at centre in the top image and at right in the bottom image, Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom 1926 (below)
Manuil Shekhtman (Ukrainian, 1900-1941) Jewish Pogrom 1926 Tempera on canvas 198 x 160cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
The artist Emmanul Shekhtman was born in 1900 in the village of Lipniki in the Volyn Province (now Zhitomir Region, Ukraine). Manuil spent his childhood with his grandfather in the town of Norinsk, where he studied at a heder (traditional Jewish elementary school). The children of the family grew up in an artistic atmosphere. His sister Malka was a poet who wrote in Hebrew under the pseudonym M. Bat-Khama (“Daughter of the Sun”). She would later work as assistant director at the Kiev State Jewish (i.e. Yiddish) Theater.
In 1913, Shekhtman entered the Kiev Art School, finishing it in 1920. In his youth, Emmanuel was an ardent Zionist and member of a youth movement. During that period, he collaborated with the Kiev branch of the Tarbut organization, while working on stage sets at the Hebrew-language Omanut theater studio. In 1922, Shekhtman entered the Kiev Art Institute to study under the primary ideologue of Ukrainian national art, Mikhail Boichuk. After graduating from the Institute in 1926, Shekhtman continued to actively cooperate with Jewish cultural organisations. From 1925 to 1927, he taught drawing at a Jewish orphanage in Kiev. In 1928, he served as head of the theatrical production of the Kiev State Jewish Theater. In the following year, Shekhtman became head of the artistic division of the Odessa Museum of Jewish Culture. In the early 1930s, there was a campaign of repression against Ukrainian avant-garde artists, which singled out Mikhail Boichuk and his present and past students – including Shekhtman, who was fired from all posts. Those years saw a shift in the country’s official policy, with the authorities beginning to cultivate a sense of Soviet patriotism, with an emphasis of the Russian historical past. In 1934, Shekhtman moved to Moscow. At first, he could find no employment, and was aided by former students who secured one-time commissions for him. Later, he was able to find work at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), for which he organized celebrations and served as a landscape architect. Subsequently, he was accepted as a member into the Moscow division of the Union of Soviet Artists.
Jewish themes were central to Shekhtman’s art. Two of his main works, “Those Who Suffered from Pogroms” (1926) and “The Resettlers” (1929), were part of a series entitled “My Biographical Particulars”. Another series of graphics by him, titled “Exile” or “Exodus” (1939-1941), exudes a sense of impending catastrophe for his people.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in late June 1941, Emmanuil Shekhtman was assigned to camouflaging military targets in Moscow. He later volunteered for frontline duty. In August 1941, he fought with a division of the Moscow People’s Militia. Subsequently, he was transferred to a separate battalion of sappers. In November 1941, he went missing in action in the area of Dmitrov (Moscow Region).
Anonymous. “Emmanul Shekhtman,” on the Yad Vashem website Nd [Online] Cited 24/03/2023
Ivan Padalka (Ukrainian, 1894-1937) Photographer 1927 Tempera on paper 33.5 x 45cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Ivan Padalka (1894-1937) was a Ukrainian painter, art professor and author who was shot during the Great Terror. Representative of the generation of the Executed Renaissance and the Boychukism movement (a cultural and artistic phenomenon in the history of Ukrainian art between the 1910s and 1930s, distinguished by its artistic monumental-synthetic style. It was an original school of Ukrainian art, formed by a synthesis of Ukrainian folk art and the church art of Byzantium, Proto-Renaissance and Ukraine. The name comes from the name of the founder of the movement: Mykhailo Boychuk.
Ivan Ivanovych Padalka (Ukrainian: Івaн Івaнович Пaдалка: 15 November 1894, Zhornoklyovy, currently Cherkasy Raion – 13 July 1937, Kiev) was a Ukrainian painter, art professor and author who was shot during the Great Terror. …
He was one of eight children born to a farming family of modest means. He began his education at the local parish school, where he first displayed a talent for art. His abilities were noticed by a local nobleman, who helped him to finance studies at the State Ceramics Vocational School in Myrhorod with Opanas Slastion. His work was often held up as a model for the class. He worked there until 1913, when he was excluded for organising revolutionary activities.
He then went to Poltava and found a position at the Ethnographic Museum [uk], where they made copies of Ukrainian carpet designs for a weaving workshop in Kiev owned by Bogdan Khanenko, who was a major patron of the arts. His earnings enabled him to enrol at the short-lived Kiev Art School. His works were regularly exhibited there, and he began to illustrate children’s books.
In 1917, after finishing his studies there, he transferred to the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, where he became a student in the workshop of Mykhailo Boychuk. While there, he was largely involved in decorative work for buildings, designing posters and creating various revolutionary materials for public display. He also received a commission from the State Publishing House to illustrate a collection of children’s stories called Барвінок (Periwinkles). He worked on that project together with Boychuk’s younger brother Tymofiy.
After graduating in 1920, he returned to Myrhorod and became a teacher at his former ceramics school. Later, he taught the same subject at a technical school in Kiev. His proficiency in his chosen specialty was widely recognised, so he was able to secure a position at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute [uk], where he worked from 1925 to 1934. That year, he returned to Kiev to accept an appointment as a Professor at the State Academy.
In 1936, he was arrested and tortured by the NKVD on charges of counterrevolutionary activities, related to his Ukrainian nationalism. In July, the following year, he was executed by firing squad, together with his former mentor and friend, Boychuk, and the painter Vasily Sedlyar. He was posthomously “rehabilitated” in 1958.
Vasyl Yermilov (Ukrainian, 1894-1967) Nove Mystetstvo ([New Art], magazine cover design) c. 1927 Indian ink and gouache on paper 36 x 23.9cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Yermilov, Vasyl [Єрмілов, Василь; Jermilov, Vasyl’] (Ermilov, Vasilii), b 22 March 1894 in Kharkiv, d 4 December 1967 in Kharkiv. Painter and graphic designer. He studied at the Art Trade School Workshop of Decorative Painting in Kharkiv (1905-1909), the Kharkiv Art School (1910-1911), and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1912-1913). In 1918 he joined the avant-garde Union of Seven group in Kharkiv and designed the script for its album Sem’ plius tri (Seven Plus Three, 1918). Under Soviet rule Yermilov designed posters, ‘agit-trains’, street decorations, billboards, the interiors of public buildings (eg, the murals in the foyer of the Kharkiv Circus and the Red Army Club in Kharkiv), theatrical sets, displays, packaging, and journal and book covers; he also directed the art department of the All-Ukrainian Bureau of the Russian Telegraph Agency (1920-1921) and taught at the Kharkiv Art Tekhnikum (1921-1922) and Kharkiv Art Institute (1922-1935). He received several international prizes for his graphic designs, including a gold medal at the 1922 Leipzig International Graphics Exhibition and an award at the 1928 Köln International Press Exhibition. While a member of the Avanhard (Avant-garde) group (1926-1929) he was graphic designer of its newspaper Doba konstruktsiï, its journal Mystets’ki materiialy Avanhardu, and, with Valeriian Polishchuk, the three issues of Biuleten’ Avanhardu. From 1927 he was also a member of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. Yermilov’s synthesis of formalist esthetics, folk designs, and traditional painting methods (including egg tempera) was an important contribution to the development of Ukrainian design of the 1920s. His distinctive style of constructivist collage and typographic design, called constructive-dynamism or spiralism, developed distinctly and in parallel with Russian constructivism. Because of his formalist interests Yermilov was forced out of the Soviet art arena in the late 1930s. In the last years of his life he taught at the Kharkiv Industrial Design Institute (1963-1937). A book about him by Z. Fogel was published in Moscow in 1975. A retrospective exhibition of Yermilov’s works was organised in Kyiv in 2011 and a monograph about his life and art, Vasyl Yermilov zhde vesnu (Vasyl Yermilov Awaits the Coming of Spring), by Tetiana Pavlova was published in Kyiv in 2012.
Anonymous. “Yermilov, Vasyl,” on the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine website Nd [Online] Cited 24/03/2023
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right, Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws 1927 (below)
Oleksandr Bohomazov (Ukrainian, 1880-1930) Sharpening the Saws 1927 Oil on canvas 138 x 155cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
In the summer of 1930, Bohomazov’s painting The Woodcutters was exhibited in the Soviet pavilion of the 17th Venice Biennale. At that time, the USSR’s participation in the biennale had become quite politicized: Russian ideologists viewed exhibitions as a vector of propaganda activities. However, young Soviet art was still relatively free from state censorship. So, together with Bohomazov other Ukrainian avant-garde artists saw their artwork make it to Venice – artists like Anatole Petrytsky, Ivan Padalka, Vasyl Sedlyar, and Sofia Nalepynska-Boychuk. The latter three would be executed seven years later under the trumped up charges of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism and leading a national-fascist terrorist organization.”
At the time, Bohomazov had already been working as a professor of easel painting at Kyiv Art Institute for eight years (founded as the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in 1917), and participation in the biennale meant his recognition as an artist and a theoretician. Unfortunately, Bohomazov did not live until the biennale opening which had been delayed for five weeks: he died in Kyiv just before it opened.
He created The Work of Woodcutters in 1927-1930 in Boyarka, a dacha condominium. “The clearing was strewn with fresh sawdust, the logs almost rang in the sun, resinous and glistening. The figures of workers on the scaffolding seemed huge against the background of bright blue sky. The high sound of the saw resonated in the air,” remembered Yaroslava, Bohomazov’s daughter. The Work of Woodcutters triptych includes two paintings: The Woodcutters (1929) and Sharpening Saws (1927); the third one to be titled Rolling Logs remained only an idea, reproduced in many sketches and watercolours.
Bohomazov resumed easel painting after a long pause due brought on by his grave emotional state following the death of his father-in-law, revolutionary perturbations, and tuberculosis. Obviously feeling that the end was near, Bohomazov put all his effort into the development of the triptych defined by its dynamic rhythms and gleaming colours (corresponding to his theoretical concept of the artist engaging with four elements of art). “I have joy from work, sun, warmth, and energy. In my painting, I don’t want to show the necessity, complicated nature and adaptation, but the joy and energy, the call – so that the audience is compelled to work, to feel like a organised part of the whole,” Bohomazov wrote in his notes.
The Woodcutters, a mature masterpiece by Oleksandr Bohomazov, continues to wow audiences all over the world. In 1931, the painting was exhibited in Zurich, and in 1932, in Japan (researchers have yet to uncover in which city the exhibition took place.) The painting was returned to Kyiv damaged. For about 90 years it remained in this state in a closed museum “special fund” where works were sent in late 1930s to be destroyed. At that time, during the fight for pure Soviet art, the avant-garde art was declared to be “formalist”, and work by these artists were banned. Only in 2019 was The Woodcutters exhibited in the National Art Museum of Ukraine – the first time in years at the exhibition “Oleksandr Bohomazov: the creative lab”. Restorers had worked on the painting for three years before releasing it for the exhibit.
For decades it was forbidden to mention the work of world-renowned cubo-futurist artists. Only in late 1960s did Bohomazov’s name resurface from its enforced oblivion. Modest exhibitions were held in Kyiv, and European avant-garde researchers, namely Jean-Claude Marcadé, Jean Chauvelin and Andrei Nakov – turned their attention to Bohomazov. His works became fashionable additions to collections ranging far beyond the Soviet Union. Bohomazov’s works are currently exhibited in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, Ludwig Museums (Germany) as well as in numerous private avant-garde collections.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing the work of Anatol Petrytskyi
Anatol Petrytskyi (Ukrainian, 1895-1964) Costume designs for Minister Pinh in the opera ‘Turandot’ at the State Opera Theatre, Kharkiv 1928 Gouache and Indian ink on paper 72 x 54cm Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine
Anatol Petrytsky (1895-1964) was a Ukrainian painter, stage and book designer. The fate of Anatol Petrytsky (1895-1965), a first-rank artist of the Ukrainian avant-garde of the first third of the twentieth century, reflects the many twists and turns in twentieth-century Ukrainian art as part of the history of Ukraine, its struggle for independence, its defeats and victories. Like his older predecessors who were born in Ukraine at the end of the nineteenth century (Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Exter), he sought to develop his talent in foreign capitals and art centers. He was drawn to the Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow, where he studied in 1922-1924, and the Bauhaus, whose entrance examination he passed in 1933 but was prevented from attending by the fateful changes in the sociopolitical life of Germany.
However, Petrytsky was already formed as an artist by the 1910s on the solid basis of the then already transformed Kyiv school of painting: the Kyiv Art School, the studios of Aleksandra Exter and Oleksandr Murashko, Mykhailo Boichuk’s monumental painting workshop at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, and the strong influence of Vasyl Krychevsky and Danylo Shcherbakivsky. He took part in the process of reviving Ukrainian art from his early years. Together with Mykhailo Semenko he blazed the trail for Futurism. Together with Les Kurbas he reformed Ukrainian stage design: he began working on musical productions (Mykola Lysenko’s Taras Bulba, Aleksandr Borodin’s Prince Igor), exploring new avant-garde forms fused into a single undivided whole with the artistic traditions of the professional and folk art of Ukraine. In the 1920s, Petrytsky gained fame at home and abroad primarily as a brilliant avant-garde scenographer. His high status as an artist was confirmed by his highly successful participation in the 17th Venice Biennale (1930), where his large canvas Disabled (1924, above) became the “highlight of the exhibition,” according to art historian Mykhailo Drahan.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right Viktor Palmov’s The 1st of May 1929 (below)
Kyiv Art Institute
The development of the visual arts in Ukraine in the 1920s-1930s was intimately linked to the Kyiv Art Institute – the successor to the Ukrainian Academy of Art. It was the first institution of higher art education in Ukraine, founded when the country proclaimed independence in 1917. In 1924, in consonance with the ideological tasks of the Soviet regime, the Academy was transformed into an Institute in order to bring educational methods in line with such trends in contemporary art as production design. To create more dynamic curriculum, the Institute signed on new instructors from across the Soviet Union with many prominent avant-garde artists, such as Kazymyr Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, joining the Faculty.
Exhibition wall text
Viktor Palmov (Ukrainian born Russia, 1888-1929) The 1st of May 1929 Oil on canvas 161 x 161cm Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Victor Nikolaevich Palmov (Ukrainian: Віктор Никандрович Пальмов) (10 October 1888 – 7 June 1929) was a Ukrainian painter of Russian origin and avant-garde artist (Futurist and Neo-primitivist) from the David Burliuk circle.
A famous artist (painter and graphic artist), art theorist, talented teacher, a prominent figure in the cultural process of the first quarter of the 20th century. Viktor Palmov is rightly considered a classic of the Ukrainian avant-garde. The artist developed his theory of “colorization” and was the author of several articles on the problems of the theory of new painting, published in the magazine “New Generation”. The master’s works were among those “arrested” and were banned from showing at galleries and museums on a par with the canvases of A. Bogomazov, D. Burliuk, A. Exter, and “Boychukists”.
Anatol Petrytskyi (Ukrainian, 1895-1964) Portrait of Mykhailo Semenko 1929 Watercolour, lead pencil and ink on paper 61.5 x 47.5cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Mykhail Semenko or Mykhailo Vasyliovich Semenko (Ukrainian, 1892-1937) was a Ukrainian poet, and a prominent representative of Ukrainian futurist poetry of the 1920s. He is considered to be one of the lead figures of the Executed Renaissance.
Kazymyr Malevych (Russian, 1879-1935) Sketch of the painting for the conference hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kyiv 1930 Pastel and gouache on paper 44 x 31cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Kazimir Malevich, in full Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, (born February 23 [February 11, Old Style], 1878, near Kyiv, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine] – died May 15, 1935, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]), avant-garde painter who was the founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.
Malevich, who was born to parents of Polish origin, studied drawing in Kyiv and then attended the Stroganov School in Moscow and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In his early work he followed Impressionism as well as Symbolism and Fauvism, and, after a trip to Paris in 1912, he was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Cubism. As a member of the Jack of Diamonds group, he led the Russian Cubist movement.
In 1913 Malevich began to create abstract geometric patterns in a manner he called Suprematism, a term expressing the notion that colour, line, and shape should reign supreme over subject matter or narrative in art. During this period, he painted a few of his most influential works, including Black Square (1915) and Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918). From 1919 to 1921 he taught painting in Moscow and Petrograd (renamed Leningrad in 1924), where he lived the rest of his life. On a 1927 visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, he met Wassily Kandinsky and published a book on his theory under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (The Non-objective World). Later, when Soviet politicians decided against modern art, Malevich and his art fell out of favour. During his last years, his works show a return to figuration. Malevich died from cancer in poverty and oblivion.
Malevich was the first to exhibit paintings composed of abstract geometric elements. He constantly strove to produce pure cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. White on White carries his Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion.
The last generation of Ukrainian modernists matured in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mainly graduates of the Kyiv Art Institute, these artists were fascinated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Novecento Italiano international movements, but their artistic activity was cut short by a radical change in the political climate. Art was increasingly viewed through a prism of ‘class consciousness’ and Soviet subject matter came to dominate all spheres of artistic output. In 1932, Socialist Realism was introduced as the only official artistic style to be practiced in the Soviet Union, with more value subsequently placed on the rally-like qualities in art rather than the merits of modernist experimentation.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at left, Kostiantyn Yeleva’s Portrait Late 1920s – early 1930s (below); and at right, Semen Yoffe’s In the Shooting Gallery 1932 (below)
Kostiantyn Yeleva (Ukrainian, 1897-1950) Portrait Late 1920s – early 1930s Oil on canvas 145 x 100cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Drawing, theatrical-decorative painting, and studio artist and teacher. Attended KKhll (1912-1918) and Ukrainian State Academy under Mykhailo Boychuk (1918-1922). Contributed to exhibitions (1917 onwards). Member of ARMU. During the Civil War (1919-1921) and World War II (1943 -1944) worked on political posters. Designer for the First Shevchenko Drama Theater of the Ukrainian SSR, Lesia Ukrainka Theater, the Odesa Ukrainian Drama Theater, and village and army clubs (1919-1926). Taught at KKhU (1926), chaired the Department of Theatrical-Decorative Art and served as Assistant Professor (1930-1932), before becoming Professor in the Drawing Department (1949). Designed patriotic posters for the TASS Windows (1943-1944). Late 1940s onwards also taught graduate courses in drawing at the Academy of Architecture of the Ukrainian SSR. Participated in the Venice Biennale (1928). One-man exhibitions in Kyiv (1940, 1945, 1950).
Semen Yoffe (Ukranian, 1909-1991) In the Shooting Gallery 1932 Oil on canvas 200 x 150cm National Art Museum of Ukraine
Stage designer. Graduated from Kharkiv Art Institute, where he studied under Vasyl Yermylov and Ivan Padalka (1926-1929); collaborated on the journal Nova generatsiia [New Generation], which reproduced some of his surrealistic drawings (1930). Active as an exhibition installationist and stage designer (1940s onwards).
How does artistic life flourish during revolution and conflict? Ukraine in the early 1900s endured unimaginable political upheaval, yet this became a period of true renaissance in Ukrainian art, literature, theatre and cinema.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s presents the ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the early 20th century, focusing on the three key cultural centres of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. Against a complicated socio-political backdrop of collapsing empires, World War I, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence, and the eventual creation of Soviet Ukraine, several strands of distinctly Ukrainian art emerged.
While émigrés such as Sonia Delaunay and Alexander Archipenko found fame outside their homeland, the followers of Mykhailo Boichuk focused on Byzantine revivalism, and the artists of the Kultur Lige sought to promote the development of contemporary Yiddish culture. The first avant-garde exhibitions in Ukraine featured the radical art of Davyd Burliuk and Alexandra Exter, and the dynamic canvases of the Kyiv-based Cubo-Futurist Oleksandr Bohomazov. In Kharkiv, Vasyl Yermilov championed the industrial art of Constructivism, while Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytskyi, Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov and Borys Kosarev revolutionized theatre design. The attempt to build a national identity in Ukraine resulted in a polyphony of styles and artistic developments across a full range of media – from oil paintings, sketches and sculpture to collages, cinema posters and theatre designs.
Twelve internationally renowned scholars, including curators from the National Art Museum of Ukraine, bring to life this astonishing period of creativity in Ukraine and all the movements it encompassed.
This volume is dedicated to the dramatic story of Ukrainian modernism. The radical Ukrainian art formed in the last decade of the Russian Empire was a seismographic indicator of the tectonic changes to come, against the background of the upcoming revolution and subsequent attempts to establish an independent state. The Ukrainian modernists actively participated in nation-building, trying to create a recognizable national style. This is their story.
After nearly five years of the bloody War of Independence (1917-21), the Bolsheviks defeated nationalist Ukrainian forces and established the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (UkrSSR). However, the initial period of Communist rule created a mere illusion of Soviet-controlled cultural autonomy. The policy of ‘Ukrainization’, initially supported by Moscow for tactical reasons, facilitated the rapid development of a national culture that very much proclaimed its own home-grown identity. The 1920s became a time of bold artistic and literary experimentation, a period of true renaissance in Ukrainian art, literature, theatre and cinema. This cultural autonomy helped Ukraine prolong its period of aesthetic experimentation in comparison with other republics in the Soviet Union. Such pivotal figures of the avantgarde art as Kazymyr Malevych (Russian: Kazimir Malevich, Polish: Kazimierz Malewicz, 1879-1935) and Volodymyr Tatlin (Russian: Vladimir Tatlin, 1885-1953), blacklisted early on in Russia as dangerous ‘formalists’, nonetheless found refuge in Kyiv. In Ukraine, as late as 1930, they still could teach, exhibit and publish freely. However, this was just a short period of calm before the inevitable storm. The policy of Ukrainization was abruptly curtailed in 1931, and there were immediate and ruthless purges of the Ukrainian intellectual elite. Numerous poets, writers and theatre directors, along with many artists, faced summary execution or imprisonment in the Gulag. Manuscripts, books and artworks were incinerated. Murals were overpainted or scraped off walls. Later, the martyrs of Ukrainian culture were referred to as the ‘Executed Renaissance’. After severe waves of repression, Ukrainian modernism was doomed to oblivion. Artworks that were not destroyed were sent to secret, purpose-built repositories.
The Great Purges culled artists and intellectuals in the length and breadth of the USSR, but in Ukraine repression started earlier and had a character all its own. In Russia at large, repressed artists and writers were classified as ‘enemies of people’, a broad and generic term. In Ukraine, they were accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, an altogether more emotive and destructive appellation. The scene was set, and the destruction of Ukrainian literature and art from 1931 onwards amounted to nothing less than mass cultural genocide. The period 1932-33 saw a broader form of genocide – the Holodomor, often called the Terror-Famine, an artificially induced famine unleashed on Ukraine by the Soviet regime, which took millions of lives. The double catastrophe had far-reaching effects that still resonate to this day, greatly amplified by the most recent invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
During Khrushchev’s abortive de-Stalinization period, interest in Ukrainian modernism started to renew. Some ‘formalist’ works, taboo for so long, were even reinstated in national museums. However, the process was painful and patchy – and behind it lay the ever-present accusation of ‘nationalism’ that had made the rehabilitation of so many Ukrainian artists nearly impossible. At the same time, though, the West had rediscovered the revolutionary avant-garde art of the early Soviet period. The fashion for ‘the Great Experiment of Russian Art’ led to the appropriation of Ukrainian artists, as they conveniently fell under the umbrella term ‘Russian avant-garde’, adroitly coined by the Western art market. By this market-driven alchemy, artists who had spent all their lives in Ukraine, and whose artistic experimentation was integral to the development of Ukrainian art, unexpectedly became ‘Russian’. Western art dealers and museum curators alike followed the old Russian imperialist agenda. Few, if any, attempts were made to clarify the difference between Russian and Ukrainian culture of the period within the art market. In broader terms, we know that the word ‘Russia’ was (and is) frequently used to describe the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the contemporary Russian Federation – a dangerously misleading if understandable Western generalization.
The real rediscovery of Ukrainian modernism started only after the fall of the Soviet Union and the declaration of Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Despite the publication of important research and the staging of breakthrough exhibitions, the process was not free from mythologizing. To reclaim the legacy of national art, Ukrainian art historians coined the definition ‘Ukrainian avant-garde’. Such a doppelganger of the generalized label, used for marking radical art from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, often with complete disregard for its geographic provenance, proved to be no less misleading in the Ukrainian case. Ukrainian artists, like their Russian counterparts of the first half of the 20th century, did not use the word ‘avant-garde’ to describe themselves, preferring instead the labels of different ‘isms’ – Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, etc. In the case of Ukrainian art, an attempt at a ‘one size fits all’ approach proved to be especially controversial. A good example is the Boichukist school, the only truly monolithic art group in the history of Ukrainian modernism. It was united by the artistic method and ideology of Byzantine revivalism and a pronounced orientation towards folk culture, so it was retrospective in essence and had nothing in common with radical experimentation. Attempts to classify it as avant-garde seem at best naive. Apart from Mykhailo Boichuk (1882-1937) and his followers, Ukrainian art did not produce any other movements united by a definite aesthetic preference. Polyphony dominated the landscape of national modernism, with artists creating their own personal ‘isms’, such as the ‘colourism’ of Viktor Palmov (1888-1929). Others developed their versions of international trends, often quite different from the source of inspiration, a principal example being the Cubo-Futurism of Oleksandr Bohomazov (1880-1930) or the ‘Constructivism’ propagated by Vasyl Yermilov (1894–1968).
Many representatives of Ukrainian modernism escape straightforward stylistic classification. A case in point is Anatol Petrytskyi (1895-1964), who was influenced by different international movements from Cubism to Constructivism, adopting them in his work in a highly individualised manner. The polyphony of identities supplemented the polyphony of styles, so that many artists born in Ukraine continued their careers in Russia or in other foreign countries but left a strong imprint on the development of Ukrainian art. One considers the mark left by Davyd Burliuk (Russian: David Burliuk, 1882-1967) and Alexandra Exter (Ukrainian: Oleksandra Ekster, 1882-1949) on the development of the local version of Cubo-Futurism, or the influence of Kazymyr Malevych, an ethnic Pole born in Kyiv, on Ukrainian artists. A further voice in this complex polyphony was Viktor Palmov, a Russian who relocated to Kyiv at the beginning of the 1920s and became one of the most active participants in the country’s artistic processes. Bearing all these complexities in mind, one might reasonably conclude that ethnic labelling within the modernist movement in Ukraine, during the time of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, can hardly help create an appropriately nuanced and realistic picture of the development of Ukrainian art.
Oleh Ilnytzkyj, the pioneer of research on Ukrainian literary Futurism, wrote about the reassessment of the history of the movement during the period of the Russian Empire: ‘The goal is not to place a new “Ukrainian” straitjacket on cultural activities in the empire, but to find way to do justice to the variety of sources and the myriad of cultural influences that flowed from so many directions. The recognition of Burliuk, Ekster and Malevich as Ukrainians does not diminish their relevance for either the imperial (transnational) avant-garde or for strictly Russian culture, where their impact is undeniable.’ Such an approach is also applicable to many artists of the Soviet period, from Klyment Redko (Russian: Kliment Redko, 1897-1956) to Oleksandr Tyshler (Russian: Aleksandr Thyshler, 1898-1980).
One of the main tasks for Ukrainian artists at the beginning of the 20th century was to create a national style. They were not alone. The age of nationalism, on the rise in Europe since the Napoleonic wars, provoked the nation-building earthquake following the collapse of the empires in 1917-18. Art played an essential role in the seismic shift. Art Nouveau, defined in Germany and Austria as Secession, in Italy as Liberty, and in Russia as Modern, became the last international style to produce a dominant visual language. The paradox was that similar stylistic features were used to visualize different national mythologies from Paris and Berlin to Helsinki and Kyiv. The Ukrainian version of Art Nouveau was no less of an attempt to find a national artistic form of self-expression. The cosmopolitan style of Oleksandr Murashko (1875-1919) was challenged by Mykhailo Zhuk (1883-1964), and especially by the Krychevski brothers, who opted for national topicality and found inspiration in Ukrainian folk art. In addition to folk art, there were other and no less important primary sources of inspiration for the Ukrainian Art Nouveau practitioners. Early medieval mosaics and frescoes, created under strong Byzantine influence, was one such. The Ukrainian Baroque of the 17th and early 18th centuries was another. It is not surprising, given the vigour and eclecticism of the movement, that the visual identity of the short-lived independent Ukrainian state of 1917–20, including the coat of arms and banknotes, created by Heorhii Narbut (1886–1920), was an exquisite example of the national version of Art Nouveau.
Ukrainian advocates of radical modernism were also very interested in co-opting the folk traditions. Ukrainian naïve pictures, embroideries, ornaments and painted eggs all fascinated Exter and Davyd Burliuk, both members of the Kyiv Cubo-Futurist scene. They were the pioneers of the transformation of the folklore elements into ‘radical chic’. The passion for folk art and ornament became an inherent part of ‘Ukrainian-ness’ in the country’s modernism, extending to such unexpected territory as the constructivist designs of Vasyl Yermilov. Despite this happy and inventive immersion in folklore, it is important to remember that the Ukrainian artists’ preoccupation with tradition was very different from that of their Russian counterparts, whose approach to folk art broadly proceeded in two directions. On the one hand, the Russians embraced naive village art, or the kitsch aspects of urban sub-culture, as a kind of shock tactic, a means to épater le bourgeois by glorifying ‘lower’ rather than ‘higher’ elements of culture. On the other, native folklore and folk art were often seen as a viable homegrown alternative to exotic, foreign imports from France and elsewhere – the perfect means by which Russian modernists might take a stance against Western decadence. Such calculated feelings were utterly foreign to Ukrainian artists, whose studious attention to folk art and ornamentation was quite devoid of irony or strategy. However radical Ukrainian modernists were, they felt they had inherited the task of establishing a national visual language from their predecessors, and took it very seriously. Unfortunately, Ukrainian modernism in all its aspects, aside from folklore influences, has been historically analysed predominantly through the lens of comparison with Russian art. Perhaps now is the time to look at it in the context of the development of modernist traditions in such Central European countries as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, where the local schools who sought a national art style were no less influenced by folk tradition than those in Ukraine.
If the Ukrainian art of the 1910s-20s has already been reasonably researched and analysed, the enforced transition to Socialist Realism still requires profound conceptualization. The attempts of leading modernists like Oleksandr Bohomazov and Viktor Palmov to find their place in the new, politically imposed frame of reference, resulted in masterpieces characterized by a new and sometimes uncomfortable hybridity of styles that certainly requires further investigation. In the same vein, the efforts of Boichukists to adjust their art to the changing demands of the time also requires fresh analysis. Their status as martyrs of Ukrainian art often precludes a dispassionate discourse on the transformation of their style, and their participation in the development of Stalinist propaganda and iconography. Whether such a shift was the result of a Faustian pact or sincere political belief remains to be answered, case by case. Fresh territory for research and discussion in Ukrainian art history is being mapped out year after year. The ground-breaking exhibition ‘Spetsfond’ (Special Secret Holding), organized by the National Art Museum of Ukraine in 2015, resulted in the rediscovery of Ukrainian art of the early 1930s. For the first time, numerous paintings, hidden for more than half a century for political reasons, were returned to public display. The show restored to Ukrainian art history the names and reputations of such painters as Kostiantyn Yeleva (1897-1950), Semen Yoffe (1909-1991) and Yurii Sadylenko (1903-1967). This was just a start, and so much more is yet to be done. For example, the influence of such trends as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Il Novecento Italiano on Ukrainian artists still requires fundamental investigation – and while research into Ukrainian cinema has been greatly stimulated though the activity of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, the history of Ukrainian photography from the 1920s and early 1930s remains largely terra incognita. This volume and the exhibition that accompanies it constitute an attempt to introduce the international public to the complicated history of Ukrainian modernism, an essential but little-known part of European culture.
What a fascinating and inspired concept for an exhibition!
In order to understand the myth and construction of the femme fatale stereotype the exhibition investigates, through art and representation, concepts such as sexuality and its demonisation, the male and female gaze, white ideals of beauty, racism, Orientalism, anti-Semitism, power relations, hate, non-binary gaze, gender roles, myth and religion and black feminism. Such areas of breath are needed to examine the myth of the femme fatale.
I just wish the media images had included some photographs from the interwar avant-garde period by photographers such as Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eva Besnyö, Ilse Bing, Lotte Jacobi, Yva, Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach, Aenne Biermann and Florence Henri for example – all of whom photographed the “New Woman” of the 1920s, an image which embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. I hope the exhibition contains images by some of these photographers.
“The femme fatale is a myth, a projection, a construction. She symbolises a visually coded female stereotype: the sensual, erotic and seductive woman whose allegedly demonic nature reveals itself in her ability to lure and enchant men – often leading to fatal results. It is this likewise dazzling and clichéd image, long dominated by a male and binary gaze, that is in the focus of the exhibition Femme Fatale. Gaze – Power – Gender at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Beyond exploring a range of artistic approaches to the theme from the early 19th century to the present, the show aims to critically examine the myth of the femme fatale in its genesis and historical transformation.” (Text from the Hamburger Kunsthalle website)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I have added further images and bibliographic information about the artists to the posting.
Many thankx to the Hamburger Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The male gaze places women in the context of male desire, essentially portraying the female body as eye candy for the heterosexual man. By valuing the desires of the male audience, the male gaze supports the self-objectification of women.
According to the Theory of Gender and Power (Robert Connell), the sexual division of power reproduces inequities in power between men and women which are maintained by social mechanisms such as the abuse of authority and control in relationships.
Pages from Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition Femme Fatale. Gaze – Power – Gender showing in the bottom posting, the room layout with sections to the exhibition
The femme fatale is a myth, a projection, a construction. She symbolises a visually coded female stereotype: the sensual, erotic and seductive woman whose allegedly demonic nature reveals itself in her ability to lure and enchant men – often leading to fatal results. It is this likewise dazzling and clichéd image, long dominated by a male and binary gaze, that is in the focus of the exhibition Femme Fatale. Gaze – Power – Gender at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Beyond exploring a range of artistic approaches to the theme from the early 19th century to the present, the show aims to critically examine the myth of the femme fatale in its genesis and historical transformation.
The “classical” image of the femme fatale feeds above all on biblical and mythological female figures such as Judith, Salome, Medusa or the Sirens, who were widely portrayed as calamitous women in art and literature between 1860 and 1920. Characteristic of the femme fatale figure is the demonisation of female sexuality associated with these narratives. Around 1900, the femme fatale image was frequently projected onto real people, mainly actors, dancers or artists such as Sarah Bernhardt, Alma Mahler or Anita Berber. What is striking here is the simultaneity of important achievements of women’s emancipation and the increased appearance of this male-dominated image of women. In the sense of a counter-image that playfully picks up on aspects of the femme fatale figure, the New Woman, an ideal emerging well into the 1920s, also becomes important for the exhibition. A decisive caesura was set in the 1960s by feminist artists concerned with deconstructing the myth of the femme fatale – along with the corresponding viewing habits and pictorial traditions. Current artistic positions, in turn, deal with traces and appropriations of the archetypic image or establish explicit counter-narratives – often with reference to the #MeToo movement, questions of gender identities, female corporeality and sexuality, and by addressing the topic of the male gaze.
To investigate the constellations of gaze, power and gender that are constitutive for the image of the femme fatale and its transformations over time, the exhibition has assembled around 200 exhibits spanning a broad range of media and periods. On display will be paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists (including Evelyn de Morgan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse) alongside Symbolist works (such as Fernand Khnopff, Gustave Moreau, Edvard Munch and Franz von Stuck), works of Impressionism (including Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Édouard Manet, Max Slevogt), of Expressionism and New Objectivity (Dodo, Jeanne Mammen, Gerda Wegener, among others). The featured positions of the early feminist avant-garde (including VALIE EXPORT, Birgit Jürgenssen, Ketty La Rocca, Maria Lassnig, Betty Tompkins) along with current works based on queer and intersectional feminist perspectives (Nan Goldin, Mickalene Thomas, Zandile Tshabalala, among others), build a bridge all the way to the present.
Dangerous waters – Lorelei and her ‘fatal’ sisters
During the Romantic era, the element of water was often associated with the idea of dangerous femininity. The figure of Lorelei, in particular, was widely and diversely interpreted in numerous works of art, music and literature. Clemens Brentano laid the foundation for the legend of Lorelei with his ballad Zu Bacharach am Rheine…, written in 1801. Here, for the first time, a female figure was linked to the Lorelei – a large slate rock on the bank of the river Rhine that was known for producing an unusual echo. The broad popular appeal of this legend began with the publication of Heinrich Heine’s poem Die Lore-Ley in 1824 and continued to grow throughout the century. Although neither Brentano nor Heine stylised Lorelei as a femme fatale, many 19th-century artistic representations of this myth reduced the female figure to her siren-like, demonic qualities. The legend of Lorelei also has a remarkable resonance in contemporary art: in her video work “das Schöne muss sterben!”, for example, Gloria Zein transfers the narrative into the urban present, giving it an ironic twist and reflecting critically on the power of beauty; Aloys Rump traces the myth that surrounds this famous rock in the Rhine back to its material origins, exposing the Lorelei legend as pure invention and projection.
Aestheticized, demonized, sexualized: the femme fatale in the Victorian age
The 19th-century image of the femme fatale was largely shaped by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of English artists around Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones was founded in 1848. Drawing on ancient myths and works of English literature, the Pre-Raphaelites (as they were later known) established a very specific ideal of beauty. Their depictions above all featured female figures to whom destructive or even fatal qualities had traditionally been attributed, such as Lilith, Medea, Circe and Helen of Troy. The Pre-Raphaelites deliberately emphasised the contrast between the subjects’ mythological demonisation and their visualisation as sensual beings of ethereal beauty. Later artists who were influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites created increasingly eroticised depictions of women, portraying them as both an ideal and a vision of fear. John William Waterhouse’s painting of Circe, for example, explicitly links her power to her both enchantingly and threateningly seductive nature. John Collier’s highly sexualised interpretation of Lilith, meanwhile, presents the mythic figure primarily as an object of male desire. This white, Victorian ideal of femininity and beauty, along with its (re-)presentation in a museum context, is reflected by Sonia Boyce in her video installation Six Acts. This work emerged from a critical intervention she performed at Manchester Art Gallery in 2018.
Sexuality & Demonisation
The term femme fatale originally describes a sensual, erotically seductive woman who puts men in danger and plunges them into their misfortune – not seldom with deadly consequences. In his painting Lilith, John Collier also illustrated such a prototype of a femme fatale. Here, the woman’s body is excessively sexualised and her sexuality demonised. This narrative also suggests: a woman’s lust is something dangerous. Even today, women are often morally condemned when they live out their sexuality openly. How can that be? Female lust is declared taboo, while male lust is celebrated? That is indeed problematic. However: the figure of the femme fatale is by now often appropriated by women as an instrument for self-empowerment.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
John William Waterhouse RA (6 April 1849 – 10 February 1917) was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.
Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece. Many of his paintings are based on authors such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Keats. Waterhouse’s work is displayed in many major art museums and galleries, and the Royal Academy of Art organised a major retrospective of his work in 2009.
The male gaze refers to the concept of a predominant masculine perspective; it represents the systematic use of male control in our society and its impact on us. The term was coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey who in the 1970s drew attention to how women in films were mostly portrayed as objects catering to the fantasies of heterosexual males. It was soon applied to other genres such as fashion, literature, music and art – and widely adopted in the everyday world. Whether in film, advertising, in novels, on the street, at school, during training or at university: the male gaze is omnipresent. It condemns, objectifies, defines standards and ideals, oppresses and classifies: male= active, female=passive. We all grew up with the phenomenon and are confronted with it on an everyday basis. As a result, all of us, including women and non-binary people, have more or less internalised it. Whether consciously or unconsciously, especially these groups tend to see themselves through a kind of mirror, anticipating the male gaze. But: understanding the male gaze also means being able to unlearn it.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Lilith is an 1889 painting by English artist John Collier, who worked in the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The painting of the Jewish mythic figure Lilith is held in the Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport, England. It was transferred from Bootle Art Gallery in the 1970s.
Collier portrayed Lilith as a golden-haired, porcelain-skinned beautiful nude woman who fondles on her shoulder the head of a serpent, coiled around her body in a passionate embrace. Against the background of a dark, brown-green jungle, stands a naked female figure, whose pale skin and long blond hair falling down her back form a stark contrast with the forest. The head position and gaze of Lilith are turned away from the viewer, concentrating on the snake’s head resting on her shoulder. The snake encircles her body in several coils, starting around its closely spaced ankles, past the knee, to her lower abdomen, where it thereby conceals. Lilith supports the snake’s body with her hands in the area of her upper body, so that the snake’s head can lie over her right shoulder up to her throat. Lilith’s head is bent towards the snake, her cheek nestles against the animal. The brown tones of the snake’s body stand out in contrast with the pale woman’s body, but take up the colour scheme of the surrounding jungle. Collier presented his painting inspired by fellow painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1868 poem Lilith, or Body’s Beauty, which describes Lilith as the witch who loved Adam before Eve. Her magnificent tresses gave the world “its first gold,” but her beauty was a weapon and her charms deadly.
The magazine The British Architect described the work in 1887: “Here is a nude woman, whose voluptuous, round form is most gracefully represented, surrounded by a great serpent, the thickest part of which crosses it horizontally and cuts it in half; her head slides down her chest and she seems to be pulling it in tighter coils. The background is a coarse kind of green, repulsive and abominable.”
Fascinated by women’s physical allure, Rossetti here imagines a legendary femme fatale as a self-absorbed nineteenth-century beauty who combs her hair and seductively exposes her shoulders. Nearby flowers symbolise different kinds of love. In Jewish literature, the enchantress Lilith is described as Adam’s first wife, and her character is underscored by lines from Goethe’s Faust attached by Rossetti to the original frame, “Beware … for she excels all women in the magic of her locks, and when she twines them round a young man’s neck, she will not ever set him free again.” The artist’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is the sitter in this watercolour, which Rossetti and his assistant Dunn based on an oil of 1866 (Delaware Art Museum).
Lady Lilith is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first painted in 1866-1868 using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the model, then altered in 1872-1873 to show the face of Alexa Wilding. The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient Judaic myth, “the first wife of Adam” and is associated with the seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a “powerful and evil temptress” and as “an iconic, Amazon-like female with long, flowing hair.” …
A large 1867 replica of Lady Lilith, painted by Rossetti in watercolour, which shows the face of Cornforth, is now owned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has a verse from Goethe’s Faust as translated by Shelley on a label attached by Rossetti to its frame:
“Beware of her fair hair, for she excels All women in the magic of her locks, And when she twines them round a young man’s neck she will not ever set him free again.”
Apparently, the ideal is the white woman. She is thought to be pure, innocent and therefore endearing. This racist idea reaches from colonial times all the way to the present day. In 2022 alone, it can be found in several social media trends. One of them is the clean girl look on TikTok.
But what is behind all this and who is the trend actually for? The clean girl aesthetic gone viral is rather minimalistic: simple clothes, subtle make-up with delicate lip gloss and small gold creole earrings. With this look, young women want to represent themselves as so-called “girl bosses”, meaning women who have everything under control. This, however, is no more than a male fantasy. It has nothing to do with real people. The clean girl image also reinforces perceptions of which kind of women are more socially accepted. Namely, those who, like the clean girl, have “smooth and porcelain-like skin”. This Eurocentric ideal of beauty can already be detected in the nineteenth-century work Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lilith‘s skin is ivory white; she is combing her hair smooth, which is still wavy at the hairline. In the clean girl look hair is also straight, usually tied into a tight braid or chignon. Curly hair is excluded – and along with it especially Black people with Afro hair. Their natural appearance is thus portrayed as dirty in contrast to the allegedly pure clean girl look – a racist narrative that continues to try to position Black women in particular as inferior in society. Whereas, some of those characteristics appearing in the clean girl look originally were appropriated from Black Culture and then minimised: big gold creoles and gel-combed hairdos are just two of many examples. The clean girls with the most TikTok views represent this kind of standard beauty: thin, white and wearing expensive clothes. On the social media schoolyard, they are the ones who are considered as cool. But what they are doing while they are at it is bowing to racist, classist ideals that need to be made visible and discussed.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855 – 2 May 1919), née Pickering, was an English painter associated early in her career with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and working in a range of styles including Aestheticism and Symbolism. Her paintings are figural, foregrounding the female body through the use of spiritual, mythological, and allegorical themes. They rely on a range of metaphors (such as light and darkness, transformation, and bondage) to express what several scholars have identified as spiritualist and feminist content.
De Morgan boycotted the Royal Academy and signed the Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage in 1889. Her later works also deal with the themes of war from a pacifist perspective, engaging with conflicts like the Second Boer War and World War I.
Racism means that people are subjected to depreciation exclusion or even to experiencing violence due to their origin, skin colour or religion. Racism comes in many forms. There is, for example, anti-Muslim, anti-Black or anti-Asian racism which is particularly directed against these groups. While such group based hostility was formerly justified above all by the “wrong” religious affiliation, from the 16th century on, allegedly scientific explanations became established. People were divided into different “races” from the time white people started enslaving Black people to then exploit them for economic profit in the new colonies. Today, most people are aware that there is no such thing as different “human races”. Instead, it is the different “social background” or “culture” that now is often used as an argument to racially stigmatise people. The ‘others’ may be described as ‘primitive’ and ‘uncultivated’, sometimes exoticised or sexualised. Men are portrayed as libidinous, women as erotic and, quite often, as their victims. The Indian postcolonialism theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critically pinpointed this colonial perspective with the sentence: “White men are saving brown women from brown men.” This ironic statement emphasises the sense of civilisational superiority of white colonisers who saw themselves as “saviours”, but often came to the country as rapists and, on top of that, oppressed the female population in their countries of origin.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Jean Delville (Belgian, 1867-1953) The Idol of Perversity (L’idole de la perversite) 1891
Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity (L’idole de la perversite), 1891. Delville was a Belgian symbolist painter, author, poet and Theosophist, studying mystical and occultist philosophies. Such philosophies concentrate mainly on seeking the true origins of the universe, specifically of the divine and natural kind, believing that knowledge of ancient pasts offers a path to true enlightenment and salvation. Delville was the leading patron of Belgian Idealist movement, specifically in art circa the 1890s, having a belief system that upheld art to higher standards of substance, believing that it should express higher spiritual truth, based on principles of Ideal, or spiritual Beauty. …
The goal of the living body is to spiritualise itself and to refine our material selves, meaning to elevate ourselves to the level of not requiring or wanting things that are just of material value. Without a spiritual path or goal, men and women that walk the earth become slaves to their material possessions, forever destined to succumb to the desires, passions, greed, and egotistic need to always seek power over one another. Under this belief, the physical world we live in becomes the land of Satan, and those without a spiritual goal become merely his slaves. According to Delville, the first step to true enlightenment is to gain power over earthly temptations, such as promiscuity and erotic temptation. Truly enlightened soul is one that can use the power of his mind to rise above the temptations of, what was believed “unquenched bestial desires of a woman”. In late nineteenth century femme fatale embodied the kind of misogynistic idea that women were lower on the evolutionary scale, and female sex was that of animalistic, monstrous and aggressive, hence, the femme fatale characterisation, meaning that women’s grotesque sexual desires led men away from their spiritual goals, and thus driving them to live a life in sin, forever slaves to the Devil. In this painting Delville portrays the femme fatale as an almost demonic entity, with the bellow angel as to show her looming over the viewer, with an almost phallic snake, reminiscent of Franz von Stuck’s Sin, slithering between her pointed breasts. This image is a direct representation of Delville’s esoteric ideologies of material versus spiritual.
Enigmatic images – the femme fatale in Symbolist art
Fantastical scenarios, imaginary dream worlds and psychological depths are the defining characteristics of Symbolism, a cultural movement that flourished throughout Europe from the 1880s onwards. The image of the femme fatale is also omnipresent in Symbolist art, but in these depictions, the female subjects often have an enigmatic, other-worldly appearance and their meaning is ambiguous. As the epitome of the cliché of ‘female mystery’, the sphinx is a prominent motif in Symbolist art. The image of this malevolent creature – a hybrid of woman, lion and bird – was strongly influenced by Gustave Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx, an important early work by the painter. Moreau’s orientalised and eroticised interpretation of Salome as an ornamental figure also shaped the perception of her as a femme fatale. A similar composition featuring a vision of John the Baptist’s floating head is found in Odilon Redon’s Apparition. His figures, however, are even further removed from objective representation and concrete corporeality. These kinds of mystifying depictions were also interpreted and elaborated by other Symbolist artists, above all in Belgium and the Netherlands. In Fernand Khnopff’s subtle drawings, the femme fatale appears as a mysterious, ambiguous projection, addressing the themes of stereotypical femininity and androgyny.
Focussing on the body – interpretations of the femme fatale in Munich
In contrast to the enigmatic dream worlds of French and Belgian Symbolism, the depictions of femmes fatales by artists of the Munich School focus more explicitly on women’s bodies. Carl Strathmann’s large-format interpretations of Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbô, which was frequently adapted in France, place the titular female figure in an ornamental Art Nouveau setting that is typical of the period. Franz von Stuck and Franz von Lenbach, on the other hand, focus on concrete physical realities; while their paintings are set in mythological and biblical contexts, they are mainly aimed at representing nudity. In Stuck’s interpretation of the Sphinx, for example, the subject is no longer depicted as a hybrid creature, but is a purely human, naked woman. Only the posture of the nude, who is reduced to her physicality and sensuality, recalls a sphinx. This kind of sexualization in images of femmes fatales often involves constructing a supposed ‘otherness’ of the depicted subject. Through the incorporation of orientalising elements and antisemitic attributions such as the stereotype of the ‘beautiful Jewess’, female subjects – above all Judith and Salome – are presented as alluring and desirable, but are at the same denigrated as ‘other’.
Orientalism
Turbans, veils, sabres, teacups, palm trees, colourful carpets and nude women in harems – this cliché-ridden image of the ‘Orient’ was spread in the West and was a major theme especially in nineteenth-century painting. In 1978, the Palestinian-American literature professor Edward Said published a book entitled Orientalism in which he characterised this image as a Western invention. By describing the ‘Orient’, meaning roughly those regions now called North Africa and the Near and Middle East, as ‘alien’ and ‘backward’, the West was able to present itself as culturally superior. This, at the same time, made it easier to justify imperialist ambitions to subjugate and exploit these regions. Orientalism has been typified by rejection and attraction alike: the people and customs of the region are portrayed as irrational, lazy and dishonest just as much as sensual, pleasure-oriented and seductive. A widespread symbol of this in painting was the figure of the “Odalisque”, a white slave girl, preferably drawn naked in the bath. She strikingly exemplifies the kind of fantasies that (mainly) white European men would live out in their depictions of the Orient: at once a ‘chaste’ victim of ‘Oriental’ tyrants and a ‘sinful’ seductress of Western conquerors. Many of these Orientalist clichés have survived to this day and can also be found, in anti-Muslim racisms, for example.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
The term anti-Semitism describes a hostile attitude towards Jews. It manifests itself in various forms, from prejudice, to insults, to violence. Anti-Semitism, which has existed for thousands of years, is the oldest known form of group-specific hatred of people, regardless of gender. Its worst manifestation was during German National Socialism under Adolf Hitler when over six million Jewish people were murdered between 1933 and 1945 in Europe. What distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of discrimination is the idea of a cultural and economic superiority of the group being attacked, unlike, for example, racism or Islamophobia, where the counterpart is usually devalued. Instead of labelling Jews as backward, in stereotypes they often appear as representatives of a modern and sophisticated worldview, which is, however, portrayed as ‘decadent’ and ‘threatening’. Conspiracy theories also often contain anti-Semitic elements, as it is imagined that all Jewish people are wealthy, influential and well-connected and thus able to act as secret ‘string-pullers’ in international affairs. Anti-Semitic prejudices often refer to categories such as wealth and power, sexuality or external characteristics.
Visually, anti-Semitic body stereotypes are sometimes expressed through the depiction of large, crooked noses (‘hooknose’), bulging lips, narrow eyes, hunched posture, bowlegs and flat feet. Somewhat more subtle, but no less problematic, is the stereotype of the “beautiful Jewess”. This cliché image from art and literature around 1900 often showed Jewish women as smart, beautiful and seductive, but at the same time marked them as ‘foreign’ and ‘different’, for example, based on orientalising elements such as jewellery, etc.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Antonin Idrac (French, 1849-1884) Salammbô 1882 Plaster Height: 182cm (71.6 in); width: 53 cm (20.8 in); depth: 71cm (27.9 in) Musée des Augustins Public domain
Carl Strathmann (German, 1866-1939) Salammbô 1894 Mixed media on canvas 187.5 x 287cm
Strathmann’s curious work occupies an intermediate position between the art of painting and the crafts. His paintings are strange concoctions studded with colored glass and artificial gems, foreshadowing similar extravagances by the Viennese Jugendstil painter Gustav Klimt. In Strathmann’s painting Salammbô, inspired by Flaubert’s novel, the Carthaginian temptress reclines on a carpet spread out on a flower-strewn meadow. Swathed in veils whose design is as complex as that of the harp beside her head, she submits to the kiss of the mighty snake that encircles her. Lovis Corinth described how Strathmann, while working on the large picture, gradually covered the originally nude model with “carpets and fantastic garments of his own invention so that in the end only a mystical profile and the fingers of one hand protruded from a jumble of embellished textiles. … coloured stones are sparkling everywhere; the harp especially is aglitter with fake jewels.” According to Corinth, Strathmann knew “how to glue and sew” these on the canvas “with admirable skill.”
Anonymous. “Carl Strathmann, Salammbô,” on the Dark Classics website 12/05/2011 [Online] Cited 01/03/2023
Arnold Böcklin (Swiss, 1827-1901) Sirens 1875 Tempera on canvas Height: 46cm (18.1 in); width: 31cm (12.2 in) Alte Nationalgalerie Public domain
Arnold Böcklin (16 October 1827 – 16 January 1901) was a Swiss symbolist painter. …
Influenced by Romanticism, Böcklin’s symbolist use of imagery derived from mythology and legend often overlapped with the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites. Many of his paintings are imaginative interpretations of the classical world, or portray mythological subjects in settings involving classical architecture, often allegorically exploring death and mortality in the context of a strange, fantasy world.
Böcklin is best known for his five versions (painted 1880 to 1886) of the Isle of the Dead, which partly evokes the English Cemetery, Florence, which was close to his studio and where his baby daughter Maria had been buried. An early version of the painting was commissioned by a Madame Berna, a widow who wanted a painting with a dreamlike atmosphere.
Clement Greenberg wrote in 1947 that Böcklin’s work “is one of the most consummate expressions of all that is now disliked about the latter half of the nineteenth century.”
Franz Ritter von Stuck (February 23, 1863 – August 30, 1928), born Franz Stuck, was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and architect. Stuck was best known for his paintings of ancient mythology, receiving substantial critical acclaim with The Sin in 1892. In 1906, Stuck was awarded the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and was henceforth known as Ritter von Stuck. …
Stuck’s subject matter was primarily from mythology, inspired by the work of Arnold Böcklin. Large forms dominate most of his paintings and indicate his proclivities for sculpture. His seductive female nudes are a prime example of popular Symbolist content. Stuck paid much attention to the frames for his paintings and generally designed them himself with such careful use of panels, gilt carving and inscriptions that the frames must be considered as an integral part of the overall piece.
Gustav-Adolf Mossa (28 January 1883 – 25 May 1971) was a French illustrator, playwright, essayist, curator and late Symbolist painter. …
Symbolist paintings
Mossa’s decade long Symbolist period (1900-1911) was his most prolific and began as a reaction to the recent boom of socialite leisure activity on the French Rivera, his works comically satirising or condemning what was viewed as an increasingly materialistic society and the perceived danger of the emerging New Woman at the turn of the century, whom Mossa appears to consider perverse by nature.
His most common subjects were femme fatale figures, some from Biblical sources, such as modernised versions of Judith, Delilah and Salome, mythological creatures such as Harpies or more contemporary and urban figures, such as his towering and dominant bourgeoise woman in Woman of Fashion and Jockey. (1906). His 1905 work Elle, the logo for the 2017 Geschlechterkampf exhibition on representations of gender in art, is an explicit example of Mossa’s interpretation of malevolent female sexuality, with a nude giantess sitting atop a pile of bloodied corpses, a fanged cat sitting over her crotch, and wearing an elaborate headress inscribed with the Latin hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas (What I want, I order, my will is reason enough).
Many aspects of Mossa’s paintings of this period were also indictive of the decadent movement, with his references to Diabolism, depictions of lesbianism (such as his two paintings of Sappho), or an emphasis on violent, sadistic or morbid scenes.
Though these paintings are the subject of most present day exhibitions, scholarly articles and books on the artist, they were not released to the public until after Mossa’s death in 1971.
Inverted images – the femme fatale turns grotesque
In the late 19th century, artists began using exaggeration and caricature to highlight the grotesque, bizarre and absurd qualities of the femme fatale motif, suggesting that the traditional image of the wickedly seductive enchantress had become redundant. While these inverted images of the femme fatale illustrate the constructed nature of this concept, they in turn employ clichés of demonic femininity. Arnold Böcklin gives an ironic, grotesque twist to a popular artistic motif in his painting Sirens, where the typically emphasised seductiveness of the hybrid creatures appears to have the opposite effect. In Gustav-Adolf Mossa’s The Satiated Siren, meanwhile, the siren’s outstanding feature is her bloodthirsty instinct. In Carl Strathmann’s almost humorously exaggerated depiction of the Head of Medusa, on the other hand, Medusa’s petrifying gaze is no longer intended to shock the viewer. Although ancient myths still provided the subject matter for these interpretations, they were increasingly losing their exemplary function and could often only be transposed to the present in a grotesque guise. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations after Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1893) were highly influential; while these also contained some vividly macabre motifs, the unmistakable ornamental aesthetic of defined lines and flat spatial planes made them appear less frightening.
Carl Strathmann (German, 1866-1939) Head of Medusa c. 1897 Watercolour and ink 69.8 cm x 69.5cm Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung CC BY-SA 4.0
Carl Strathmann (11 September 1866, Düsseldorf – 29 July 1939, Munich) was a German painter in the Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles.
His father, also named Carl Strathmann, was a merchant and manufacturer, who later served as consul in Chile. His mother, Alice, was originally from Huddersfield, England, and was an art enthusiast. From 1882 to 1886, he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, with Hugo Crola, Heinrich Lauenstein and Adolf Schill. After being dismissed for a “lack of talent”, he enrolled at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School, Weimar where, from 1888 to 1889, he studied in the master class taught by Leopold von Kalckreuth.
When Kalckreuth left, he did as well; moving to Munich, where he lived a Bohemian lifestyle as a free-lance artist, and met the painter Lovis Corinth, who became a lifelong friend and associate. In 1894, he painted one of his best known works: “Salammbô”, inspired by a novel of the same name by Gustave Flaubert. In this monumental painting (6 x 9 feet) Salammbô, a high priestess of the Carthaginians, is shown caressing a snake, as part of a ritual sacrifice. Many were horrified, calling it a “sadistic fantasy”. The scandal made him immediately famous.
Femme fatale, saint and vampire – the elevation and denigration of women in the art of Edvard Munch
Among the many images of the femme fatale that were created around 1900, Edvard Munch’s ambiguous, both positively and negatively connoted female figures occupy a place of their own. Existential questions and universal themes such as life, death, love, loss and grief are central to Munch’s art. Women are omnipresent in his compositions, appearing in a variety of roles and stereotypical depictions; at the same time, they are inseparably linked to the artist’s personal experience of life and love. The transfiguration of this experience often leads to the opposite extreme. Munch’s painting Madonna illustrates the contradictory aspects of his image of women: the depicted subject can be interpreted as a lustful femme fatale or as a saintly figure. The relationship and tension between the sexes is another leitmotif in Munch’s art. This is illustrated by his painting Vampire in the Forest, which leaves the viewer in doubt as to whether the depicted female figure is a loving woman or a bloodthirsty creature. Demonisations of femininity and female sexuality that threaten male existence appear throughout Munch’s oeuvre. They are as much an expression of his fears as of his self-stylisation as a victim – and once again reveal Munch’s image of the femme fatale to be a misogynistic projection.
Impressionist digressions – staged presentations from the theatrical to the nude
The theme of the femme fatale is even addressed in Impressionist art, which aimed to create immediate and realistic depictions rather than idealised representations. Here, however, the image was presented in very different ways. Lovis Corinth’s stage-like scenario shows a dramatically made-up, bare-breasted Salome bending over the head of John the Baptist. The abysmal aspect of her power is visualised above all through the sexualization of her body. The female figures in Max Liebermann’s interpretations of the biblical theme of Samson and Delilah, on the other hand, are far less eroticised. The choice of this subject – an unusual one for the artist – reveals his awareness of the popularity of the femme fatale motif. The lack of historicising details and focus on the strength of the austere-looking female figures, however, situate Liebermann’s stark images more decisively in the present than those of Corinth. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin also portrayed a femme fatale figure – but was evidently using this theme as a justification for an explicit nude. In his drawing, which takes its title from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, the female subject is reduced to her sex: the reference to the fictional character is, therefore, merely a pretext.
Power Relations
Smash the Patriarchy! Free the Nipple!
Women and many non-binary people are confronted with various dress codes and rules of conduct in their everyday lives. The skirt should not be too short. Breastfeeding in public is taboo. A woman has to wear a bra in the office, otherwise there may be professional consequences. Above all, bodies perceived as female are being eroticised. The Free the Nipple movement is fighting against this. It’s a matter of choice: whether it’s a long or short skirt, bra or not – everyone decides for themselves. The breast perceived as female is also censored in social media.
The Free the Nipple movement has been criticised for not paying enough attention to the nuances concerning Black people and People of colour, for not pursuing an intersectional approach, but rather for primarily reflecting a white feminism.
Fighting for Female Freedom
In Spain, it was decided in May 2022 that catcalling should be banned. Catcalling? Many women experience obtrusive looks, being whistled at or hearing disrespectful comments about their appearance on the streets every day. Verbal sexual harassment is harmful and leaves its mark. Yet it still is often presented as an alleged compliment, also in films. In the 1968 performance Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), VALIE EXPORT strapped a ‘scaled-down cinema’ in front of her bare chest. Passers-by had ‘public access’ for thirty seconds at a time during which they were allowed to touch her breasts. Interestingly, it was not VALIE EXPORT and her (upper) body that were thus exposed, but rather the passers-by who accepted this offer in public. Who is being embarrassed here and who is a voyeur? How are power and gaze relationships reversed here?
The Bechdel Test was introduced in 1985 by writer and cartoonist Alison Bechdel, namely with her comic dykes to watch out for. The test focuses on the stereotyping of women in film has only three rules:
1/ The movie has to have at least two women in it, 2/ Who talk to each other, 3/ About something other than a man.
Pretty simple criteria that don’t say much about whether a film is sexist!? Yet many films do not fulfil the criteria of the Bechdel Test.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Otto Greiner (16 December 1869 – 24 September 1916) was a German painter and graphic artist. He was born in Leipzig and began his career there as a lithographer and engraver. He relocated to Munich around 1888 and studied there under Alexander Liezen-Mayer. Greiner’s mature style – characterised by unexpected spatial juxtapositions and a sharply focused, photographic naturalism – was strongly influenced by the work of Max Klinger, whom he met in 1891 while visiting Rome.
Where Does All the Hate Come From?
Hatecore
Misogyny is an attitude that refers to hatred of women (Ancient Greek: misos = hate, gyne = woman). It has existed for thousands of years all over the world. It can be seen in many historical works of art, in the extermination fantasies of Otto Greiner, for example, but also in our modern times. Since the emergence of the internet, misogyny has also increasingly manifested itself in the digital space, where people perceived as female are many times more likely than people perceived as male to be targeted, sexualised and threatened.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Lovis Corinth (21 July 1858 – 17 July 1925) was a German artist and writer whose mature work as a painter and printmaker realised a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism.
Corinth studied in Paris and Munich, joined the Berlin Secession group, later succeeding Max Liebermann as the group’s president. His early work was naturalistic in approach. Corinth was initially antagonistic towards the expressionist movement, but after a stroke in 1911 his style loosened and took on many expressionistic qualities. His use of colour became more vibrant, and he created portraits and landscapes of extraordinary vitality and power. Corinth’s subject matter also included nudes and biblical scenes.
Max Liebermann (20 July 1847 – 8 February 1935) was a German painter and printmaker, and one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in Germany and continental Europe. In addition to his activity as an artist, he also assembled an important collection of French Impressionist works.
The son of a Jewish banker, Liebermann studied art in Weimar, Paris, and the Netherlands. After living and working for some time in Munich, he returned to Berlin in 1884, where he remained for the rest of his life. He later chose scenes of the bourgeoisie, as well as aspects of his garden near Lake Wannsee, as motifs for his paintings. Noted for his portraits, he did more than 200 commissioned ones over the years, including of Albert Einstein and Paul von Hindenburg.
Becoming femme fatale: between projection and self-presentation
In the period around 1900, the image of the femme fatale was increasingly projected onto real people. A cult of female actors, dancers and artists emerged, above all in cities such as Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Femmes fatales were now also situated in the realm of theatre, cinema and variety entertainment. Male projection and active self-presentation both played their part in this development, and particular modern media served to disseminate corresponding depictions of women: Alfons Mucha’s posters of Sarah Bernhardt contributed significantly to the fact that in public perception, the image of Bernhardt as a person gradually merged with her theatrical roles – although the actress herself also cultivated her reputation as an eccentric figure. In the same way, many people in the public eye used the medium of photography to increase their popularity. Portrait photographs taken by Madame d’Ora, for example, were used to publicise Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste’s scandal-ridden show Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy. The composer Alma Mahler was also among those who had their portraits taken at Atelier d’Ora. Her reputation as a femme fatale was, however, mainly shaped by Oskar Kokoschka. The painter developed an obsessive desire for Mahler during their affair and at the same time stylised her as a disastrous, destructive force – a demonisation that reached its climax in the destruction of a life-size fetish doll he had commissioned in his ex-lover’s likeness.
Madame d’Ora (Atelier d’Ora) Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste 1922 From “The Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy”
Dora Kallmus (Madame d’Ora) (Austrian, 1881-1963), Arthur Benda (German, 1885-1969) Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in their dance Märtyrer [Martyrs] 1922 Gelatin silver print Albertina, Vienna
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Arthur Benda (23 March 1885, in Berlin – 7 September 1969, in Vienna) was a German photographer. From 1907 to 1938 he worked in the photo studio d’Ora in Vienna, from 1921 as a partner of Dora Kallmus and from 1927 under the name d’Ora-Benda as the sole owner. …
In 1906, Arthur Benda met photographer Dora Kallmus, who also trained with Perscheid. When she opened the Atelier d’Ora on Wipplingerstrasse in Vienna in 1907, Benda became her assistant. The Atelier d’Ora specialised in portrait and fashion photography. Kallmus and Benda quickly made a name for themselves and soon supplied the most important magazines. The peak of renown was reached when Madame d’Ora photographed the present nobility in 1916 on the occasion of the coronation of Emperor Charles I as King of Hungary.
In 1921, Arthur Benda became a partner in Atelier d’Ora, which also ran a branch in Karlovy Vary during the season. In 1927 Arthur Benda took over the studio of Dora Kallmus, who had run a second studio in Paris since 1925, and continued it under the name d’Ora-Benda together with his wife Hanny Mittler. In addition to portraits, he mainly photographed nudes that made the new company name known in men’s magazines worldwide. A major order from the King of Albania Zogu I, who had himself and his family photographed in 1937 for three weeks by Arthur Benda in Tirana secured Arthur Benda financially. In 1938 he opened a new studio at the Kärntnerring in Vienna, which he continued to operate under his own name after the Second World War.
Anita Berber (10 June 1899 – 10 November 1928) was a German dancer, actress, and writer who was the subject of an Otto Dix painting. She lived during the time of the Weimar Republic. …
Her hair was cut fashionably into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled “The Dancer Anita Berber”. Her dancer friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film Algol (1920), was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than low slung loincloths and Anita occasionally a corsage worn well below her small breasts.
Her performances broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged taboos. Berber’s overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public chatter. In addition to her addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber’s favourites was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.
Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, she was also a heavy alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. She was said to be surrounded by empty morphine syringes.
Anita Berber (1899-1928), and to a lesser extent her husband / dance partner Sebastian Droste (1892-1927), have come to epitomise the decadence within Weimar era Berlin, their colourful personal lives overshadowing to a large extent their careers in dance, film and literature. Yet the couple’s daring and provocative performances are being re-assessed within the history of the development of expressive dance, and their extraordinary book ‘Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase’ (‘Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy’-1922), is a ‘gesamkunstwerk’ (total work of art) of Expressionist ideology largely unrecognised outside a devoted cult following.
The book
Berber and Droste chose to express themselves almost exclusively through the Expressionist / Modernist ethos, which was in itself filtered through the angst of Germany during the Weimar period.
Expressionism had been in existence before Weimar and, like many art movements, it had no formal beginnings, as opposed to a ‘school’ of artists who might band together under a common technique. It was fundamentally a reaction against the Impressionists who were seen by the Modernists as merely portrayers of ‘reality’ but who had failed to add anything of the artists own interior processes such as intuition, imagination and dream. This new wave of artists found inspiration in painters such as Van Gogh and Matisse but also drew from writers such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the Symbolists, together with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Freudian psychology.
Expressionists believed the artist should utilise “what he perceives with his innermost senses, it is the expression of his being; all that is transitory for him is only a symbolic image; his own life is his most important consideration. What the outside world imprints on him, he expresses within himself. He conveys his visions, his inner landscape and is conveyed by them”. Herwert Walden: Erster Deutscher Herbstsalaon (1913).
The image is the poem as portrayed in the book by D’Ora. Interestingly, it is doubted whether the dance was performed (at least in Vienna) topless. Once again, this would indicate that the book is to be considered as its own specific entity. The poems cite their inspirations: artists Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Matthias Grünewald and authors lsuch as Villiers De L’Isle Adam, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Verlaine, E.T.A. Hoffman and Hanns Heinz Ewers.
The New Woman – a counter-image to the femme fatale?
Strongly influenced by their experiences during the First World War, the artists associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement focused on present-day themes and realities. Their works reflected a changing society and a new relationship between the sexes: women were no longer only active in the domestic roles of wife and mother, but were now also participating in political and social life outside the home, wearing clothes that would traditionally be read as masculine, and pursuing careers – as artists and office workers, but also as revue dancers, waitresses or sex workers. With their bobbed hair, painted red lips, trouser suits, hats and cigarettes, they represented a new ideal: the New Woman. The image of the New Woman was omnipresent in illustrated women’s magazines and satirical journals of the time. The artist Jeanne Mammen, whose early work was greatly inspired by Symbolism, articulated women’s growing self-awareness and a new understanding of sexuality and gender in her paintings, while Gerda Wegener’s portraits of Lili Elbe drew attention to the existence of gender identities beyond the binarism of male and female. The motif of the femme fatale was now countered by a contemporary, emancipated ideal of womanhood that replaced traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
Black top hat slanting one way, cigarette slanting the other, red lips, short hair, men’s suit, challenging pose: this is how Berlin artist Jeanne Mammen saw the “New Woman” in the wild 1920s, the “garçonne” (feminine form of the French “garçon”, boy). She got rid of the corset, and with it the expectations of how women should dress or behave.
Snakes
Snakes are the perfect accessory to signal danger and seduction at the same time. Pure sex appeal! Remember: in the Bible, it is the nasty snake that persuades Eve to nibble from the tree of knowledge, and afterwards Adam and Eve are suddenly ashamed of being naked but also find it somehow exciting … Women are called snakes when they are considered manipulative and use their sex appeal to seduce men who supposedly don’t really want that. The combination of the naked female figure and snakes is particularly popular in the 19th century, when women had hardly any social power or status, but started rebelling against that. Strange coincidence, isn’t it?
Long flowing hair
Long Flowing Hair is considered a symbol of absolute femininity and seduction par excellence in nineteenth-century paintings. If it is shaggy or even made of snakes (beware: Medusa head!), this is supposed to indicate that its wearer is morally depraved. Conversely, in the twentieth century, short hair usually stands for emancipation from outdated gender images and for a free, sometimes queer sexuality.
Mirrors
“Women see themselves being looked at,” wrote the English art critic John Berger. Women looking at themselves (narcissistically) in the mirror in paintings are meant to prove the vanity of the female sex. Yet these paintings rather prove the dominance of the male gaze that turns women into objects through its constant scrutiny or even surveillance. Some say that the mirror in the paintings has now been replaced by computer or smartphone screens, in which especially women are reflected for the male gaze on social media. Do you see it that way too?
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
The non-binary gaze does not exist! As long as we are living in a society dominated by men, there can be no non-binary gaze. Because it is not our own gender identity that decides how we look at others, but the system in which we live. And that, all over the world, is still patriarchy. So as long as we are living in social structures in which humanity is divided binarily into male and female, we cannot escape this gaze. For this, it does not matter where on the gender scale we locate ourselves, whether we characterise ourselves as male, female, non-binary or whatever. To have a female gaze, we would have to live in matriarchy. Therefore, under the global domination of male capitalist structures, there can be no queer, no trans (siehe LGBTQIA), no Black Gaze, because all these identities continue to be marginalised and discriminated against. Gazes, especially in art, are always connected with power, with external determinations, with conditioning. There can be no non-binary gaze for the sole reason that it would not classify living beings into different sexes, would not categorise them. In the required non-binary form of society – which would be interested in the equality of the different – this form of exercising power would not even exist.
But there would still be gazing wouldn’t there? Or does it mean that for that reason alone there can be no non-binary gaze?
The non-binary gaze is the future!
The male gaze divides people into men and women, into those who look and those who are looked at, into the active and the passive, into subjects and objects. The non-binary gaze abolishes “gender” as a distinguishing feature altogether because it has no interest in this type of category. Neither living beings nor anything else like colours, styles or smells are assigned to a single gender, but exist only for and from themselves. Individual features such as lipstick, stubble or breasts are not read as indicators of gender, but are perceived impartially and without this filter in their specific properties, such as shape, colour, structure etc. Therefore, this gaze does not exert any power, because it does not classify and evaluate what is being looked at into any existing categories. It does not look from top to bottom, not from bottom to top, not at individual parts or the overall view, but it does all this simultaneously with everyone, the gazers as well as those gazed at. The non-binary gaze has the power to destabilise our entire world order, because qualities and characteristics can now be perceived in a completely new way, without prejudices and evaluations. For this concerns not only human bodies but all forms of being that we can imagine.
Actually, it is interesting that we not only classify people, but also, for example, shapes – angular vs round – or smells – tart vs sweet – according to gender.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Deconstructing, appropriating and retelling: abolishing the image of the femme fatale
The fight against the traditional image of the femme fatale began at the latest with the emergence of feminist art in the 1960s: feminist avant-garde artists challenged such outdated notions of women and began creating their own new narratives of femininity, sexuality and physicality. Self-portraiture and self-presentation, especially in the medium of photography, takes on a particular significance in the creation of self-empowering images of one’s own body. Female artists find many different ways to deal with the clichéd image of the femme fatale. Deconstructive approaches by artists such as Ketty La Rocca have contributed a great deal to dismantling this image, as have ironic and subversive appropriations by the likes of Birgit Jürgenssen. Other female artists reimagine the mythological figures who were long depicted as femmes fatales, presenting them, as Francesca Woodman did, in subtly restaged scenarios; depicting them as powerful goddesses – as seen, for example, in the works of Mary Beth Edelson; or, like Sylvia Sleigh, situating them outside the boundary of binary gender. Arresting representations of female corporeality, meanwhile, such as those created by Maria Lassnig and Dorothy Iannone, provide positive images that leave the narrative of demonic, deadly female sexuality far behind them.
Gender & Role Clichés
What does gender mean?
Gender describes the social, lived, perceived sex of a person. Gender is an English term, but is also used in German, precisely when it comes to social characteristics and gender identity. Gender is not limited to what is assigned to us at birth on the basis of physical characteristics (sex) but rather refers to socially constructed attributes, opportunities and relationships.
The teacher who says to you: “Well, your handwriting doesn’t look like that of a girl.” The colour pink is for girls and women, just like dresses and skirts; the colour blue and trousers are for boys and men. The latter should not cry, that would be weak. So, better for them to suppress their feelings? But then there is the saying “Boys will be boys”, meaning that’s just the way they all are. Boys are seen as wild and rebellious, girls as calm and understanding. But these are not biological traits; it’s the way we were brought up in a system of patriarchy. So, boys are allowed to get away with more, while girls are expected to put up with a lot of things. Role stereotypes hurt and reduce us all and press us into categories. Because they say: all people in a group should behave in the same way – which is pretty absurd.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
The varied afterlife of the femme fatale: contemporary (counter-)images
Nowadays there is no single, unambiguous vision of the femme fatale, and the counter-images are equally multifaceted. Artists examine traces of the clichéd concept, explore representations and adaptations of the femme fatale trope, reflect on the male gaze in art history, and consider gender identity, female physicality and sexuality from intersectional and queer feminist perspectives. In Jenevieve Aken’s work, for example, the ‘super femme fatale’ is a positively connoted, liberated (identificatory) figure who defies the constraints of a patriarchal society. Nan Goldin’s photographs show drag queens appropriating iconic figures who have long been stylised as femmes fatales, such as Marilyn Monroe or Madonna. In a similar way, Goldin’s video works place the mythological figures of Salome and the Sirens in new contexts. Betty Tompkins’ series of images highlight the fact that female sexuality is still being demonised today; her complex combinations of words and images reveal the continuities in a violently patriarchal art field, up to and including the #MeToo movement. Important counterpoints are also provided by artists such as Mickalene Thomas and Zandile Tshabalala, who deal with female beauty, physicality and sexuality through critical engagement with a white art canon.
Text from the Hamburger Kunsthalle website
Insectionality / Black Feminisms
Black women who are simply portrayed leading their everyday lives, without being reduced to their suffering or racial trauma experiences – unfortunately, this is a rarely shown image. The woman in the painting Lounging 1: G fabulous [below] is unmistakably depicted as Black. Next to her is a soft bathrobe. She is relaxing in a room with pompous wallpaper, on a fluffy carpet in front of a glamorous couch. Her material possessions, together with the fact that she is resting, are markers of luxury. For in the system of white supremacy, Black women are expected to live in a “hustle and grind culture”, where they continually have to prove themselves and try twice as hard as their white counterparts. Resting as a form of resistance is thus understood as a counter-movement and a radical political practice against social injustice. The slogan “rest is resistance” became famous on social media through the organisation The Nap Ministry. Though the woman in Lounging 1: G fabulous is nude, she is not depicted in a voyeuristic or sexist way – as Black women are in many works of European and American art history. The power of the gaze no longer lies with a voyeur, but in this case emanates from the sitter. Despite her nakedness, the image is in no way about conforming to a male gaze. The woman in the work simply shows herself as she is.
Likewise, Jenevieve Aken’s series The Masked Woman [below] is about self-fulfilment. Her self-portrayals show everyday scenes from the life of a woman in Nigeria who has decided against the role of the subordinate housewife. Instead, she leads a contented solo life as a “super femme fatale” – as she writes herself. A decision for a lifestyle that is not nearly as socially prestigious as living in a bourgeois nuclear family. Both works create new self-designations and show how extensive and multi-layered Black female identities are.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
The Masked Woman is a self-portrait series that explores representation of gender in Nigeria society through a performative lens. It attempts to avert the overarching male gaze by facing it head on with the artist’s own actions and choices. The images portray the solitary lifestyle of the “super femme fatale” character, choosing to achieve pleasure and contentment through self-fulfilment that not dictated by the subservient role as a house wife or defined through a man’s affection. While depicting a confident and sexually free woman, the subject’s mask and body language also suggest a nuanced tone of isolation which speaks to her stigmatization in a society that has limiting and strictly defined roles of what the proper woman should be. By diverting the status-quo and exercising freedom of choice, such women are perceived as extreme, eccentric, and outside of polite society in Nigeria. The series personifies a growing number of independent, professional women in Nigeria who at once assert their autonomy while also being ostracized by cultural norms. Rather than waiting for the narrative to be told from the outside, I choose to give birth to my own freedom, in hope that it will inspires other women in Nigeria to express their independence and free-will.
Jenevieve Aken. “The Masked Woman,” on the Jenevieve Aken website Nd [Online] Cited 04/03/2023
Jenevieve Aken (born 1989) is a Nigerian documentary, self-portrait and urban portrait photographer, focusing on cultural and social issues. Her work often revolves around her personal experiences and social issues surrounding gender roles. …
The Masked Woman
This is a black and white, self-portrait series meant to depict women and their social roles in Nigerian culture. The images depict the peace and self-fulfilment of a woman without the stigmatised overarching views of women in a Nigerian culture. The images also explore how women can feel constrained by the stereotypes of what a “proper women” should act like in society. These photos are meant to exemplify women who have broken these stigmas but feel isolated by the norms of the society. In this series Aken hopes to inspire Nigerian women to practice their freedom regardless of external stereotypes.
Lilith was the first in various respects. Apparently, not only the Adam’s first wife who lived equally with him in the Garden of Eden, but also the first feminist, because she simply flew away when he demanded submission from her. Conveniently, as recorded in older Babylonian accounts, she was a hybrid being and had wings. Others imagined her as a hybrid between a woman and a serpent. Unfortunately, as a woman who was sexually independent, she evidently did not have a good image among the patriarchy, for she was said to bring sickness and death, to seduce and kill men, be infertile and kill newborn babies with the poisonous milk from her breast. In Jewish feminist theology, however, she stands for wisdom and strength because she was the first being to convince God to tell her his name – granting her unlimited power.
Judith
Judith is described in the Old Testament as a beautiful, wealthy and, besides this, pious widow who defended her Jewish homeland against the seizure by the Assyrian general Holofernes. She saved her mountain village of Bethulia by trusting in God completely and impressing Holofernes with her charm and wise speeches, so that she was able to sneak into his confidence. On the 40th day of the occupation, there was a celebration in Judith’s honour at which Holofernes got so drunk that Judith was able to cut off his head with her sword. The Assyrians left in horror and Judith retired to her quiet widowhood. Thanks to her deed, the overall trust in God was so great that no one could shake the Israeli community for a long time. In the Western world, the figure of Judith was often used as a motif in art, from the nineteenth century onwards with an increasingly eroticising, orientalising and anti-Semitic undertone. Judy Chicago, on the other hand, showed her as a feminist icon in her famous installation Dinner Party in the 1970s.
Medusa
Today, Medusa is mainly known for her extravagant hairstyle consisting exclusively of live snakes. How did this come about? There exist several variants of her story in Greek mythology, but the best known says that Pallas Athena happened to witness her husband Poseidon raping the beautiful Medusa. Instead of helping her and imprisoning him, she disfigured the rape victim forever by conjuring up: snakes on her head, pigs’ teeth, scaly skin, arms made of bronze and a tongue hanging out. Anyone who caught sight of her would henceforth turn to stone in horror. The artistic representation of the terrifying snake’s head has fascinated artists since ancient times, and even today it plays a role in films, games or even the logo of the Versace fashion label. It appears to be the perfect antithesis to the Western ideal of women – evil, tough and ugly – and, according to some research, could represent the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, which went hand in hand with the demonisation of female strength.
Salome
Salome, who features prominently in the New Testament, albeit without being named, became famous for a dance: she danced so impressively and seductively at a feast that her powerful stepfather Herod assured her that he would grant her any wish in return. Her mother Herodias whispered in her ear what she wanted: the head of her adversary John the Baptist, who had publicly criticised the illegitimate marriage between her and Herod and thus humiliated her. The cut-off head was presented on a platter. In the nineteenth century, art was obsessed with this female figure, generally depicted as a lightly to barely clothed vamp who, because of her enthralling sex appeal, could only cost men their lives.
Madonna
When it comes to the idealisation of femininity, nearly everything conceivable in Christian societies comes together in the image of the Madonna figure. Since the first appearance of Madonna portraits from the second century onwards, the Mother of God has been painted as an absolute symbol of a pure, innocent and self-sacrificing femininity, typically one including and suggesting motherliness. Mostly, she is shown in these pictures with the little Child Jesus in her arms or lap. The figure Mater dolorosa, meaning Mother of Sorrows, refers to the pain of childbirth and the lifelong care of a child (particularly a divine one). But there are also other, sometimes surprising expressions and variations of these representations: for example, the Madonna lactans, a nursing Madonna with visible breast, the Black Madonnas or Madonnas with a body-encompassing, almond-shaped corona shaped like a vulva.
However, a Madonna is not always staged in a supernatural, maternal manner. She can also be depicted somewhere between the extremes of ‘saint’ or ‘whore’.
Doing Feminism – With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Birgit Jürgenssen (1949-2003) was an Austrian photographer, painter, graphic artist, curator and teacher who specialised in feminine body art with self-portraits and photo series, which have revealed a sequence of events related to the daily social life of a woman in its various forms including an atmosphere of shocking fear and common prejudices. She was acclaimed as one of the “outstanding international representatives of the feminist avant-garde”. She lived in Vienna. Apart from holding solo exhibitions of her photographic and other art works, she also taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
With the epoch-spanning exhibition Femme Fatale: Gaze – Power – Gender, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is dedicating itself for the first time to diverse artistic treat-ments of the dazzling and clichéd image of the femme fatale. The stereotype of the erotic and seductive woman who holds men in her thrall, ultimately leading them to their downfall, has long been shaped by the male gaze and by a binary understanding of gender. The show will focus on various artistic manifestations of this theme dating from the early nineteenth century to the present while critically examining its origins and transformations: What historical changes and subsequent appropriation processes has the image of the femme fatale undergone? What role does it still play today? How do contemporary artists negotiate the gaze, power and gender constellations this image evokes in an effort to shift our perspective? The exhibition explores these questions based on some 200 exhibits across diverse media. On display are paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists (Evelyn de Morgan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse) as well as works of Symbolism (Fernand Khnopff, Gustave Moreau, Franz von Stuck), Impressionism (Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann), Expressionism and New Objectivity (Dodo, Oskar Kokoschka, Jeanne Mammen, Edvard Munch, Gerda Wegener). Early feminist avant-garde artists (VALIE EXPORT, Birgit Jürgenssen, Maria Lassnig, Betty Tompkins), alongside recent works taking intersectional and (queer) feminist approaches (Jenevieve Aken – Philipp Otto Runge Foundation Fellow, Nan Goldin, Mickalene Thomas, Zandile Tshabalala) build a bridge to the present day. Among the paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations and video works on view are a wealth of high-ranking international loans as well as major works from the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Highlights include Gustave Moreau’s major Symbolist work Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), Edvard Munch’s painting Vampire in the Forest (1916-1918), Sonia Boyce’s much-discussed video installation Six Acts (2018), and Nan Goldin’s recent video works Sirens (2019-2021) and Salome (2019).
The “classical” image of the femme fatale was inspired mainly by biblical, mythological and literary figures (such as Judith, Salome, Medusa, Salambo and the Sirens) that were associated in art between 1860 and 1920 with the notion of mortal danger. Combining the feminine ideal with ominous portents, these pictures, often featuring stylised protagonists, convey a demonisation of female sexuality. Around 1900, this female image was increasingly projected onto real people, in particular actors, dancers and artists (such as Sarah Bernhardt, Alma Mahler and Anita Berber). Striking in this context is the simultaneous advancement of women’s emancipation and an upsurge in images of the femme fatale. The exhibition therefore also takes a look at the ideal of the New Woman that emerged in the 1920s as a counter-image that subtly takes up aspects of the femme fatale. Equally telling is the caesura that feminist artists brought about starting in the 1960s by radically deconstructing the myth and, with it, entrenched points of view and pictorial traditions. Contemporary artistic positions in turn address questions of gender identity, female corporeality and sexuality as well as the #MeToo movement and the male gaze. They track the traces and transformations of the image of the femme fatale or in other cases establish explicit counter-narratives.
The exhibition is accompanied by a particularly extensive art education programme: In addition to a diverse range of guided tours including livestreams of curator talks, a chatbot module will debut that lets visitors enter into a dialogue with six femme fatale figures from the art-works on view. A text-based dialogue system using artificial intelligence playfully tells background stories about the works and their artists. Developed jointly with the Stadtteilschule am Hafen, this module specifically addresses a younger target group. The Hamburger Kunsthalle is also offering audio descriptions for the first time. For selected exhibits, supplementary tactile copies are provided, which give people with visual impairments a way of accessing the exhibition independently by feeling contours. More audio tours are available in the Hamburger Kunsthalle app: for adults in German and English, for children from 8 years and older, and in simple language (both German). On the 4th Thursday of each month, a Salon fatal will dedicate itself to socially relevant topics that tie into the exhibition such as sexuality and the construction of beauty ideals. The salon will take the form of a reading, performance, panel discussion, concert or workshop, featuring changing guests. In cooperation with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Metropolis Kino is showing a film series on the theme of the femme fatale – from silent films to recent productions.
A free companion booklet, produced in collaboration with Missy Magazine, opens up intersectional and (queer) feminist perspectives on the show. The exhibition theme will also be explored in interdisciplinary depth in the accompanying catalogue (Kerber Verlag), scheduled for publication in early 2023. The catalogue will be available for 39 euros in the museum shop or for the bookstore price of 50 euros at http://www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de.
Press release from Hamburger Kunsthalle
Birgit Jürgenssen (Austrian, 1949-2003) Untitled (Self with pelts) 1974/1977
Blickmacht
The exhibition Femme Fatale: Gaze – Power – Gender is dedicated to the myth of seductive, ominous femininity – and its deconstruction. This is an extract from Ina Hildburg-Schneider in conversation with the exhibition organisers Markus Bertsch and Ruth Stamm translated from the German by Google Translate:
Do the artists of the time deal with their fears of the early emancipatory movements in the 19th century by depicting the femme fatale?
Stamm: I believe that the picture has something to do with a growing women’s movement in the 19th century, which became more and more institutionalised from 1865 – right up to women’s suffrage. This is exactly the time when the classic femme fatale images are created. But that’s not all. There are also a number of other aspects, further emancipation movements, but also associated fears and projections. Orientalism and anti-Semitism in particular play a role in the femme fatale image.
Bertsch: And the self-perception of the man has also been very different over time. This is often overlooked. There is the age of decadence in France, in which the male artist sees himself as frail and in this way stylises himself as the victim of the apparently overpowering women. Whether this is a firm conviction or a staging remains to be seen. The structure was immensely complex and allowed very different, sometimes contradictory readings of the femme fatale.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the role models for depicting the femme fatale changed. Now the works of art show “real” women. Who do you think of first?
Bertsch: I’m thinking of Sarah Bernhardt, Alma Mahler, Anita Berber. Suddenly living people were referred to as “femmes fatales”. They sometimes even adopted the characteristics of a femme fatale themselves – or, as in the case of Alma Mahler, they were the product of an obsession. Yes, Oskar Kokoschka went particularly far with his admiration for Alma Mahler. This is documented by a photo series in the exhibition.
Stamm: Kokoschka had a fetish doll made by the doll maker Hermine Moos after Alma Mahler, according to his very specific, sometimes explicitly physical ideas. However, his wish for a doll that was as lifelike as possible was not fulfilled – the result disappointed him greatly. The photos in our exhibition show the doll, which served as his model many times, draped in various poses. After Kokoschka had created a number of paintings and drawings based on the doll, some of which brought life to life, the story ended with its violent destruction. Ultimately, in this way, Kokoschka got rid of the figure of Mahler, which he stylised, obsessively sought out and at the same time demonised.
Is the First World War a turning point in the history of the motif?
Bertsch: I think so. Everything that was previously present as a mythical reference dissolves, and art faces the current political and social realities more strongly. Certain images of femininity are being phased out. The classic type of femme fatale is eroding and disappearing.
The “New Woman” developed in the interwar period – is she the female interpretation of the femme fatale?
Stamm: The New Woman was not a concrete antithesis to the femme fatale, but a new, quite stylised, emancipated image of women that developed with the growing women’s movement. In fact, this ideal was only lived by very few women from rather elitist circles who could afford it. The “type of woman” with bob haircuts and cigarettes that accompanies this has been reflected all the more in art and of course offers a completely different narrative than the femme fatale.
Jeanne Mammen is one of the early 20th century artists on display. She was educated in Paris and Brussels. Some of the sheets shown were created there. Can she create a “Homme fatale” with the heart stabber (Herzensstecher)?
Bertsch: She definitely does. The Herzensstecher is a figure that already fascinated me in the 2016 exhibition in Frankfurt, and that can be read as a counterpart to the overpowering femme fatale motif. Mammen is a very independent artist who brought together many spheres of influence in her work and had important teachers in Brussels in Jean Delville and Fernand Khnopff, both of whom are represented in our exhibition. Both of them addressed the relationship between the sexes in their art and in some cases already created androgynous figures. Mammen dealt productively with this symbolist heritage, but created independent, deviating images of masculinity and, above all, of femininity.
Markus Bertsch heads the 19th Century Collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and is curator.
Ruth Stamm is project assistant for the exhibition Femme Fatale: Gaze – Power – Gender.
Ina Hildburg-Schneider is an art historian and has been an editor at the Friends of the Kunsthalle since 2022.
Ina Hildburg-Schneider. “Blickmacht,” on the Freunde Der Kunsthalle website Nd [Online] Cited 03/03/2023
Dorothy Iannone (American, 1933-2022) The Statue Of Liberty 1977 ColoUr silkscreen on paper 32 9/10 × 23 3/5 in (83.5 × 60cm)
Dorothy Iannone (August 9, 1933 – December 26, 2022) was an American visual artist. Her autobiographical texts, films, and paintings explicitly depict female sexuality and “ecstatic unity.” She lived and worked in Berlin, Germany. …
The majority of Iannone’s paintings, texts, and visual narratives depict themes of erotic love. Her explicit renderings of the human body draw heavily from the artist’s travels and from Japanese woodcuts, Greek vases, and visual motifs from Eastern religions, including Tibetan Buddhism, Indian Tantrism, and Christian ecstatic traditions like those of the seventeenth-century Baroque. Her small wooden statues of celebrities with visible genitals, including Charlie Chaplin and Jacqueline Kennedy, especially display with the artist’s interest in African tribal statues.
The term is derived from the English word “able” and denotes discrimination based on physical abilities. People whose bodies are deemed less “able” due to a disability or impairment, are socially and spatially excluded and devalued. An ableist society adopts a ‘healthy’ body as the norm and sees all others as (negative) aberrations. Ableism is, for example, when a person in a wheelchair is dependent on the help of others because buildings aren’t constructed barrier-free. Or when blind students at universities or educational institutions don’t have full access to all teaching materials.
Antisemitism
Hostile attitude toward Jews. It presents in various forms – from prejudice and verbal abuse to violence and murder. The gravest manifestation of antisemitism was German Nazism under Adolf Hitler, when between 1933 and 1945 more than six million Jewish people were murdered.
BIPoC
BIPoC is a political self-designation and short form for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. The short form BIPoC combines the communities referred to but also underlines their different experiences. Because of this, the term is sometimes used as an alternative for the term People of Color, to make Black people and indigenous identities explicitly visible and to emphasise that not all People of Color have the same experiences.
Black
Black is capitalised and is the politically correct and self-chosen term for Black people. The capital B emphasises social-political positioning within a society principally dominated by white people. The term Black is therefore not about biological characteristics but about socio-political affiliations. Black people are diverse and have completely diverse skin tones. As such, the term is more about highlighting the collective experiences that Black people have in this system and to emphasise their ongoing resistance.
Black Culture
The term Black Culture describes Black popular culture which deals mainly with entertainment, pleasure as well as knowledge and which is expressed via aesthetic codes and genres. It represents the identity and politics of Black cultures according to their beliefs, experiences and values. Although Black Culture encompasses all Black people worldwide, US-American Black pop culture is given the most attention.
Cis- and Transgenderism
Cis and trans are Latin words. Trans means “across” or “beyond” and, in relation to gender, refers to a person who does not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth and who experience themselves “beyond” it. Cis is, in a sense, the opposite. It can be translated as “on this side of” and indicates that someone lives within the boundaries of their assigned sex.
Classism
When recipients of state benefits are depicted as unwilling to work and unintelligent, this is an example of classism. Or when a working-class child is laughed at in university for not knowing certain trends or foreign words. Because people are not only discriminated against due to their gender and skin colour, but also because of the social and economic class they were brought up in. The term classism is even older than sexism and racism, the terms often associated with it: it was already in use in the 19th Century. Those who are poor and / or have less education due to a lack of resources are devalued in a classist society and have more difficulty accessing institutions seen as elitist.
Colonialism
Colonialism refers to a process of subjugation: one group of people goes to another group of people and imposes on it its rules, laws, language, customs, or religions in order to exploit it economically and culturally. When we speak of colonialism today, we mostly mean the process which began with the colonisation of the American continent by Europe’s ruling classes from the 15th century onwards and its negative consequences (such as racism, slavery, and exploitation) which can be still felt today.
Discrimination
Discrimination means the use of supposedly unambiguous distinctions to justify and rationalise unequal treatment. As a result of this unequal treatment, the persons discriminated against experience social disadvantages. Discrimination is an extensive system of social relationships, in which the discriminatory distinctions operate. Discrimination can therefore not be understood as a consequence of individual qualities. A by now very well known example for discrimination on a structural level is the Gender Pay Gap. This is the gap between the salaries of men and women as well as non-binary people for equal work. In 2022, women in Germany are still paid 18 percent less in terms of (gross) hourly wage than men.
Drag
The best-known examples are drag queens. A drag queen portrays, in a performative and artistic way, the appearance and behaviour of women, or rather femininity, a drag king the demeanour and outward appearance of men. This play with (exaggerated) femininity or masculinity is hence a show which is independent from the gender of the performer. The most famous drag practice is the embodiment of drag queens. These are often performed by queer men.
Empowerment
Mostly used as self-empowerment, it means to turn a disempowered situation into a more empowered one through certain actions. Often, this is a group process, for example, racially and sexually discriminated people who unite and fight for their cause and thus gain more confidence and, at best, more rights. This process may also take place symbolically, for example when young girls feel “empowered” by the encouraging writings of a feminist.
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism means a view of the world that renders European history and so-called European principles as the primary measure of value. The term eurocentrism consequently makes evident global power relations and colonial historical thinking.
Feminism
Feminism is a social movement, which has already undergone several waves with different priorities, for example the achievement of women’s suffrage in the first wave or the legal equality of men and women in the second wave. While in the past many feminists assumed essentialist gender conceptions, meaning a clear distinction between only two genders – female and male – contemporary feminism is more inclusive. Often it no longer speaks of women but uses the term FLINTA*, which encompasses Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Trans and Agender and, with the asterisk, all others who identify as feminine. Earlier feminists had often focused on the concerns of middle-class, white, western women. But as part of an intersectional consideration of feminism, queer, PoC, trans and many more feminist voices have gained influence in recent decades. Initially, feminism was understood as the liberation of women from the patriarchy, but today it ideally refers to engagement for a world in which all forms of oppression, discrimination and exploitation will be abolished.
Gender and sex
Gender describes the social, lived, perceived sex of a person. Gender is an English term, but is also used in German, precisely when it comes to social characteristics and gender identity. Gender is not limited to what is assigned to us at birth on the basis of physical characteristics but rather refers to socially constructed attributes, opportunities and relationships.
Heteronormativity
When at day care little girls and boys, who are friends, are asked if they want one day to marry each other, this is an example of heteronormativity: a worldview in which heterosexuality is seen as the norm, as ‘normal’ and so what is desirable for everyone. A heteronormative society divides people into the binary categories of men and women, values men as more important and tends to be hostile towards queerness.
Hustle-Culture/Grind-Culture
Hustle-Culture/Grind-Culture describes a lifestyle, in which an aspiration to success and high-performance take priority. Long working hours and little rest are seen as the benchmarks of success.
Imperialism
Derived from the Latin word “imperium”, it means to pursue extended political and economic power outside one’s own (national) borders. By means of military or economic strategies, but also with the aid of culture and education, it is attempted to gain control over other countries or regions.
Intersectionality
The term intersectionality was coined in 1989 by lawyer, scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It is about the intersection and interaction of social identities and connected systems of oppression. Intersectionality focuses on the fact that people are often disadvantaged or benefit from several characteristics at once. Social, ethnic background, social and economic status as well as gender can be examples of such interconnected categories. A person may be Black and a woman, hence experiences racism and sexism. A white woman, on the other hand, experiences sexism too but benefits from her white privileges. Intersectional feminism therefore aims to recognise and make visible the multi-layered perspectives of people who experience overlapping forms of oppression.
LGBTQIA*
LGBTQIA* is an English-language collective term for ways of living and loving outside the heterosexual norm, which is now being used around the world. It is short form for Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Inter and Asexual. The asterisk stands for further identities that are perhaps not or not completely included therein, to leave no one out.
The male gaze
The male gaze is the concept of the male stare and stands for how systematically male control is applied and functions in our society. The term was coined by the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who in the 1970s, brought attention to the fact that women in films were mostly represented as objects of male heterosexual fantasy.
Misogyny
Misogyny literally means “hatred of women” (from the ancient Greek: “misos” = “hate”, “gyne” = “woman”) and has been prevalent around the globe for thousands of years as a derogatory to murderous attitude towards about 50% of the world’s population.
(Non-) Binarity
If something is binary, it functions like a two-part system: there is always only the one and the other, like the two sides of a coin. Both mutually define each other. A binary gender system assumes that there are only men and women, and that everyone must belong to one of these two categories. Non-Binarity (NB) breaks up this rigid structure. Non-binary people, sometimes also called enbies (from NB), identify neither as man nor woman.
Objectification
Objectification describes the dehumanising treatment of certain people as things, hence as objects. The most common example is sexist objectification by men, who reduce women to sex-objects.
Orientalism
The term Orientalism exposes how the world has been divided into two parts: on the one side there is the supposedly modern, enlightened West, the ‘Occident’, which sees itself as the centre and protagonist of world events. The ‘Orient’ finds itself on the other side, depicted by the West as ‘backward’ and ‘unmodern’, yet at the same time as ‘exotic’ and ‘sensual’. According to the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said, who published his influential book titled Orientalism in 1978, the ‘Orient’ was invented by Europeans in order to better dominate and exploit these regions.
Othering
With othering, a usually more powerful group, or individual, dissociates itself from another group characterising it as ‘alien’ and ‘different’, thus devaluing it and connoting it negatively. The group higher up in the power structure thus discriminates against the people described as ‘different’ who cannot defend themselves against these attributions.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system predominantly controlled and shaped by hetero-cis men. This means men determine the gender roles within society. Everything in the patriarchy is geared towards cis-men and they profit highly from such a system. Patriarchal structures are firmly established everywhere in our society. For example, for many in a heterosexual relationship it is still a given that the woman takes parental leave after a pregnancy to take care of the child while the father continues to work. Another example of patriarchal structures: the man is supposed to propose marriage. And after the wedding, the woman takes his name. A man’s power is thus always paramount, though emotions are denied to men. To cry, to be shy or insecure, or to take parental leave after the birth of a child – according to the patriarchy this is not how ‘real’ men behave. In this way men too are restricted by the patriarchy’s toxic masculinity.
People of Color
The term People of Color, PoC for short, is a self-designation and does not describe, like the terms Black and white, any particular skin tones. It is a matter of a position in society and an umbrella term for communities that experience marginalisation due to racism. The experienced racist discriminations vary and are far-reaching. To be asked every day “where are you from?” or be told “but your English is very good” are examples of this, as well as not being invited for a job interview because of one’s name or being threatened or attacked on the train.
Queer
If something is “queer” in English, it is actually peculiar or odd. Since the end of the 19th Century the word has been used derogatively for people who felt sexually attracted to their own gender. From the 1980s, this negative meaning was consciously and provocatively reversed by activists and the term was used positively. Today, many people who do not love heterosexually and / or live cisgendered, describe themselves as queer.
Racism
If people have to endure marginalisation or even violence because of their origin or their appearance, for example because of their skin colour or their religion, that is racism. Racism can take on many forms – for example anti- Muslim, anti-Black, or anti-Asian racism, that particularly targets these groups.
Sexism
Sexism is the discrimination against people because of their sex. “Blonde jokes”, unequal pay for equal work or unwanted wolf-whistles on the street – these are all examples of sexism. Since we still live in patriarchal societies in which men dominate, sexism affects people perceived as female. But men too can be restricted by patriarchal gender stereotypes such as “boys don’t cry” or “men don’t know about babies.”
Stereotyping
Stereotyping is the generalisation of a group of people. In the process, individuals and the differences between them are not considered. Instead, all people in this group are reduced to the same, often negative, characteristics.
Stigmatisation
Stigmatisation is a distinctly negative demarcation from other individuals or groups within a society. This may happen in interpersonal relationships, such as bullying in school, or on a structural level, when for example People of Color repeatedly experience rejection when searching for apartments, or when people with specific therapy experience are denied civil servant status. In this last case, derogatory characteristics are attributed to a mentally ill person by large sections of society, denying them full social acceptance.
White
White is the socio-politically correct description for white people. It is not a biological term, rather a position in society. The terms Black, PoC and BIPoC are capitalised because they are self-chosen terms. The term white, on the other hand, is written in lower case and often in italics. The call for concrete labelling of white, hence white people and white privileges, became louder through antiracist movements. Because being white, from a white perspective, is generally the norm. In this way, being white is often made invisible, while all non-white people are made visible and portrayed as supposedly ‘different’.
White Supremacy
White Supremacy is the ideology that white people, and all their ideas, actions and opinions are superior to those of BIPoC. White Supremacy is a self-sustaining system in that it marginalises People of Color though colonialism, exploitation and repression and so guarantees white people a continuous position of power.
This accompanying glossary is a cooperation between Missy Magazine and Hamburger Kunsthalle. It is published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Glossary
Concept and Realisation: Sonja Eismann, Melanie Fahden, Selvi Göktepe, Josephine Papke, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Weniger Authors: Sonja Eismann, Josephine Papke Editors: Nanda Bröckling, Melanie Fahden, Selvi Göktepe, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Weniger English translation: Matthew Burbridge
Exhibition dates: 11th November 2022 – 2nd April 2023
Co-curated by Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart and Lara Rabinovitch, renowned writer, producer, and specialist in immigrant food cultures. The exhibition was coordinated at New-York Historical by Cristian Petru Panaite with Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections.
Ei Katsumata (American) Carnegie Deli, New York, NY 2008 Photo by Ei Katsumata /Alamy Stock Photo
Culture and its history – past, present and future – is always so fascinating!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Our special exhibition examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a uniquely American restaurant and reveals how Jewish delicatessens became a cornerstone of American food culture.
Organised by the Skirball Cultural Center, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a uniquely American restaurant and reveals how Jewish delicatessens became a cornerstone of American food culture.
The exhibition explores the food of immigration, the heyday of the deli in the interwar period, delis and Broadway, stories of Holocaust survivors and war refugees who worked in delis, the shifting and shrinking landscapes of delis across the country, and delis in popular culture. On display are neon signs, menus, advertisements, deli workers’ uniforms, and video documentaries. The local presentation is enriched with artwork, artefacts, and photography from New-York Historical’s collection along with restaurant signs, menus and fixtures from local establishments, mouthwatering interactives, and a Bloomberg Connects audio tour. And families: Be sure to pick up a copy of our kid-centric guide to the exhibition in the gallery.
Text from the New-York Historical Society website
2nd Ave Deli // “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli
New-York Historical Society
What makes the 2nd Ave Deli so special? The New-York Historical Society takes a trip to the Midtown landmark to talk to the owner, managers, workers, and customers about the special magic of the decades-old delicatessen where they “prepare the foods that our mothers and grandmothers made.”
James Reuel Smith (American, 1852-1935) Louis Klepper Confectionary and Sausage Manufacturers, 45 E. Houston Street, New York c. 1900 Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
James Reuel Smith (1852-1935) was an American photographer and amateur historian who worked in the late 19th century to early 20th century. He was known for his documentary photographs of historical springs and wells in New York City before they were buried beneath the concrete of the rapidly growing city. Many of these natural water resources disappeared as the New York municipal water system developed.
Smith’s photographs documented a vanishing way of life in urban America. Drawing and fetching water had been an essential activity of daily life prior to the development of the modern municipal water system. In the 1870s New York City undertook efforts to eradicate the natural open wells and springs as they were perceived to be hazardous to health. The official municipal source for city water was the Croton Aqueduct which was endorsed by the NYC sanitation officers, rather than local neighbourhood wells and springs.
Hester Street, Lower East Side c. 1900 Postcard Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Unknown photographer (American) Anne Russ Federman serving customers at New York’s Russ & Daughters, with Hattie Russ Gold in the background 1939 From the collection of Russ & Daughters
Benjamin Segan (American, 1924-2017) Letter to Judith Berman, April 23, 1944 Caserta, Italy Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Benjamin David “Ben” Segan was born in New York City on 27 August 1924, to Jacob and Lillian Segan, immigrants from Vilnius, Lithuania. Ben attended George Washington High School in Manhattan, where he met his future wife, Judith “Judy” Berman. During his senior year he attended school by night to work in a defense plant by day.
Nineteen-year-old Ben was drafted into the United States Army as a private on 28 April 1943. His initial processing took place at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he began his correspondence with Judy, writing to her almost daily until he left the service. By mid-May 1943 he was at Camp Croft, South Carolina, where he remained in basic training through late September and to operate radio equipment.
By October 1943 he was sent to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, and from there shipped to Italy to join the 93rd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. In Europe he served in Italy, southern France, and Germany. During the Battle of Monte Cassino (a.k.a. the Battle for Rome), January-May 1944, he worked in the 93rd’s communication section.
Although he saw combat, Ben refrained from graphic descriptions in writing to his fianceé. Some of his reticence was due to restrictions imposed by the censors. For example, on 7 April 1945, during the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp from the Nazis, which he witnessed, Ben wrote, cryptically (in letter 574), “I’ve been extremely busy recently darling, & don’t think it’s so necessary to tell you as you must have a[n] inkling from the latest news reports on our progress.”
The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, but Ben was still there as late as November 10th (the date of his last letter in the collection), when he wrote from the French port of Le Havre, unsure of which ship he’d be on or indeed when it would sail.
Ben was honoured with the American Service Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Service Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.
Once home he married Judy on 10 March 1946 at Temple Ansche Chesed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They raised two children and worked together for many years in New York City’s Garment District.
Lionel S. Reiss (American born Poland, 1894-1988) Frankfurter and Lemonade from Manhattan Crosstown series c. 1945 Watercolour, black ink, white gouache, and graphite on paper 11 × 8 in. (27.9 × 20.3cm) New-York Historical Society, Foster-Jarvis Fund, and contribution of Harry Goldberg
Lionel S. Reiss (1894-1988) was a Polish-American Jewish painter born in Jaroslaw, Poland (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he studied commercial art. His family had moved to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. As immigrants to the United States, Reiss’ parents joined the ranks of other Eastern European Jews who were fleeing their native countries at the start of the 20th century. Lionel Reiss’ family settled on New York’s Lower East Side neighbourhood and Reiss himself spent the majority of his life in the city. Reiss worked as a commercial artist for newspapers, publishers, and a motion picture company. Eventually he became art director for Paramount Studios and is credited to be the creator of the Leo the Lion logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
Reiss became known for his portraits of Jewish people and landmarks in Jewish history, which he made during his trip to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in the early 1920s. Being American and Jewish himself, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the Old World. In 1919 Reiss temporarily left the United States to travel to the aforementioned regions, and recorded the everyday life that he encountered in the ghettos. His trip resulted in exhibitions in major American cities.
At the dawn of the Holocaust in 1938, Reiss, who had long returned to the United States, published his book My Models Were Jews, in which he illustratively argued that there is no such thing as a “Jewish ethnicity”, but the Jewish people are rather a cultural group, whereby there is significant diversity within Jewish communities and between different communities in different geographical regions. Reiss was therefore presenting an argument against what he considered to be a common misconception that existed about the Jews. Later works included a 1954 book, New Lights and Old Shadows, which dealt with “the new lights” of a reborn Israel and the “old shadows” of an almost eradicated European Jewish culture. In his last book, A World of Twilight, published in 1972, with text by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Reiss presented a portrait of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Reuben’s Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben] 1946 Patricia D Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
This fall, New-York Historical Society presents “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli, a fascinating exploration of the rich history of the Jewish immigrant experience that made the delicatessen so integral to New York culture. On view November 11, 2022 – April 2, 2023, the exhibition, organised by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where it is on view through September 18, examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a cuisine that became a cornerstone of popular culture with worldwide influence. The exhibition explores the food of immigrants; the heyday of the deli in the interwar period; delis in the New York Theater District; stories of Holocaust survivors and war refugees who found community in delis; the shifting and shrinking landscapes of delis across the country; and delis in popular culture. On display are neon signs, menus, advertisements, and deli workers’ uniforms alongside film clips and video documentaries. New-York Historical’s expanded presentation includes additional artwork, artefacts, photographs of local establishments, and objects from deli owners, as well as costumes from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a mouthwatering interactive, and a Bloomberg Connects audio tour.
“It’s our great pleasure to present an exhibition on a topic so near and dear to the hearts of New Yorkers of all backgrounds,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli tells a deeply moving story about the American experience of immigration – how immigrants adapted their cuisine to create a new culture that both retained and transcended their own traditions. I hope visitors come away with a newfound appreciation for the Jewish deli, and, with it, the story of the United States.”
“Whether you grew up eating matzoball soup or are learning about lox for the first time, this exhibition demonstrates how Jewish food became a cultural touchstone, familiar to Americans across ethnic backgrounds,” said co-curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart. “This exhibition reveals facets of the lives of Central and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that echo in contemporary immigrant experiences. It shows how people adapt and transform their own cultural traditions over time, resulting in a living style of cooking, eating, and sharing community that is at once deeply rooted in their own heritage and continuously changing.”
“I’ll Have What She’s Having” is co-curated by Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart along with Lara Rabinovitch, renowned writer, producer, and specialist in immigrant food cultures. It was coordinated at New-York Historical by Cristian Petru Panaite with Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections. The exhibition explores topics including deli culture, the proliferation of delis alongside the expansion of New York’s Jewish communities, kosher meat manufacturing, shortages during World War II, and advertising campaigns that helped popularise Jewish foods throughout the city.
Highlights include a letter in New-York Historical’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library collection from a soldier fighting in Italy during World War II writing to his fiancée that he “had some tasty Jewish dishes just like home” thanks to the salami his mother had sent – a poignant addition to Katz’s famous “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army” campaign. Images show politicians and other notable figures eating and campaigning in delis. Movie clips and film stills include the iconic scene in Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally…, which inspired the exhibition title. This and other movie scenes underscore the prominent role of Jewish delis in American popular culture.
Unique to New-York Historical’s presentation is a closer look at the expansion of Jewish communities at the turn of the 20th century, not just on the Lower East Side but also in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. In the 1930s, some 3,000 delis operated in the city; today, only about a dozen remain. The exhibition gives special attention to dairy restaurants, which offered a safe meatless eating experience; a portion of the neon sign from the Famous Dairy Restaurant on the Upper West Side is on display. Salvaged artefacts, like the 2nd Avenue Delicatessen storefront sign and vintage meat slicers and scales from other delis, are also on view, along with costumes by Emmy Award-winning costume designer Donna Zakowska from the popular Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Visitors are invited to build their own sandwiches named after celebrities, such as Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, and Sammy Davis Jr., in a digital interactive inspired by menu items from Reuben’s Deli and Stage Deli. On the Bloomberg Connects app, exhibition goers can enjoy popular songs like “Hot Dogs and Knishes” from the 1920s, along with clips of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia discussing kosher meat pricing, 1950s radio ads, and interviews with deli owners forced to close during the pandemic lockdown.
In a nostalgic tribute to departed delis that continue to hold a place in the hearts of many New Yorkers, photographs show restaurants that closed in recent years. Eateries include the Upper West Side’s Fine & Schapiro Kosher Delicatessen, Jay & Lloyd’s Kosher Delicatessen in Brooklyn, and Loeser’s Kosher Deli in the Bronx. An exuberant hot dog-shaped sign from Jay & Lloyds Delicatessen, which closed in May 2020, and folk artist Harry Glaubach’s monumental carved and painted signage for Ben’s Best Kosher Delicatessen in Queens, also pay tribute to beloved establishments. The exhibition concludes on a hopeful note, highlighting new delis that have opened their doors in the past decade, such as Mile End and Frankel’s, both in Brooklyn, and USA Brooklyn Delicatessen, located steps from the site of the former Carnegie and Stage Delis in Manhattan.
Support
“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli is organised and circulated by the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California. Exhibitions at New-York Historical are made possible by Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang, the Saunders Trust for American History, the Evelyn & Seymour Neuman Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. WNET is the media sponsor.
Press release from the New-York Historical Society
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) Save Freedom of Worship: Buy War Bonds 1943 Poster; offset lithograph 28 x 20 inches Public domain
World War II poster encouraging individuals to buy war bonds. The poster includes an image by Norman Rockwell and was published by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington, DC, in 1943.
The poster depicts men and women of various races and faiths, including a woman with rosary beads, with hands clasped in prayer. Norman Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for more than four decades. The Four Freedoms or Four Essential Human Freedoms is a series of four oil paintings that Rockwell produced in 1943 for reproduction in The Saturday Evening Post alongside essays by prominent thinkers of the day. Later they were the highlight of a touring exhibition sponsored by the Saturday Evening Post and the United States Department of the Treasury. The Four Freedoms theme was derived from the 1941 State of the Union Address by United States President Franklin Roosevelt in which he identified four essential human rights (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear) that should be universally protected. The Office of War Information printed four million sets of Four Freedoms posters by the end of the war. World War II was a massive conflict which involved a majority of the nations of the world, and became the most widespread and deadliest event in human history; it had profound ramifications politically and economically that lasted into the next century. …
Posters were used extensively throughout the war by countries on both sides for purposes such as propaganda, morale, and the broad dissemination of information. The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a U.S. government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. It operated from June 1942 until September 1945. It coordinated the release of war news for domestic use, and, using posters and radio broadcasts, worked to promote patriotism, warn about foreign spies and recruit women into war work. The office also established an overseas branch, which launched a large scale information and propaganda campaign abroad. The War Finance Committee was placed in charge of supervising the sale of all bonds, and the War Advertising Council promoted voluntary compliance with bond buying. More than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of advertising was donated during the first three years of the National Defense Savings Program. The government appealed to the public through popular culture. Norman Rockwell’s painting series, the Four Freedoms, toured in a war bond effort that raised $132 million.
Unknown photographer Rena Drexler on the day of her liberation from Auschwitz Poland, 1945 Private collection
Installation view of the exhibition “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli at the New-York Historical Society showing at centre, a photograph by an unknown photographer Rena and Harry Drexler at Drexler’s Deli, North Hollywood, CA (c. 1970s, below)
Unknown photographer (American) Rena and Harry Drexler at Drexler’s Deli, North Hollywood, CA c. 1970s Private collection
Unknown photographer (American) Vienna Beef Factory, inspecting sausages Chicago, IL c. 1950s Vienna Beef Museum
Unknown photographer (American) Vienna Beef Factory, curing pastrami Chicago, IL, c. 1950s Vienna Beef Museum
Paula Weissman’s Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union Books 1958-1983 Courtesy of Paula Weissman
Installation view of ads from the “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye” campaign (1960s). Despite the campaign’s success, the ads relied on both ethnic stereotypes and a narrowly focused white, Eurocentric view of Jewish identity that excluded Jews of Color. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
With a self-reflection that is arguably as Jewish as its subject, the exhibition doesn’t shy away from an awareness that the deli, created by Eastern and Central European immigrants, is an almost exclusively Ashkenazi institution, and thus limited in its view of Jewish life and culture. Take, for example, the commentary on the posters featuring the famous “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” series of rye bread ads. Considered progressive for their time because of the diversity of the models, in retrospect the ads suggest that racial diversity among the Jewish community is an anomaly, which is not the case.
Howard Zieff (photographer) You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye [New York : s.n., 1965?] Photomechanical print (poster): offset, colour Library of Congress Public domain
Howard Zieff (photographer) You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye [New York : s.n., 1965?] Photomechanical print (poster): offset, colour Library of Congress Public domain
Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen (outside cover) New York City, 1968 Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York. Historical Society
Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen New York City, 1968 Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York. Historical Society
Katz’s Delicatessen Napkin 1980-2000 Paper Overall: 5 × 5 in. (12.7 × 12.7cm) Gift of Bella C. Landauer
Unknown photographer (American) Abe Lebewohl with hero, from the 2nd Ave Deli, New York, NY c. 1990
Unknown photographer (American) Snack at Manny’s Delicatessen Chicago, IL, 2010 Image Professionals GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
New-York Historical Society 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street) New York, NY 10024 Phone: (212) 873-3400
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