Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists' Colony, 1894-1905

KÜNSTLERINNEN Kunsthistorisches Forum Irsee, Band 4 Hrsg. von Markwart Herzog und Sylvia Heudecker (Schwabenakademie Irsee) Birgit Ulrike Münch (Universität Bonn) und Andreas Tacke (Universität Trier) KÜNSTLERINNEN Neue Perspektiven auf ein Forschungsfeld der Vormoderne Herausgegeben von Birgit Ulrike Münch, Andreas Tacke, Markwart Herzog, Sylvia Heudecker michael imhof verlag Birgit Ulrike Münch, Andreas Tacke, Markwart Herzog, Sylvia Heudecker (Hrsg.): Künstlerinnen. Neue Perspektiven auf ein Forschungsfeld der Vormoderne (= Kunsthistorisches Forum Irsee, Bd. 4). Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017. © 2017 Michael Imhof Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Stettiner Straße 25 D-36100 Petersberg Tel.: 0661/2919166-0; Fax: 0661/2919166-9 www.imhof-verlag.com | [email protected] REDAKTION Anja Ottilie Ilg, Hannah Völker REPRODUKTION UND GESTALTUNG Anna Wess, Michael Imhof Verlag UMSCHLAG Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782): Selbstbildnis, um 1782, Öl auf Leinwand, 153,5 x 118 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.Nr. 1925 | © Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Foto: Jörg P. Anders FRONTISPIZ UND ABBILDUNG SEITE 237 Jacob Houbraken (1698–1780): Doppelporträt der Künstlerinnen Johanna Koerten (1650–1715) und Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), signiert „J. Houbraken del.“; Handzeichnung, rote Kreide auf Papier, 148 x 92 mm; Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap im Rijksprentenkabinet Amsterdam ABBILDUNG SEITE 6 Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754–1820): Das Atelier einer Künstlerin, 1789, Öl auf Leinwand, 116,5 x 88,9 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, online collection ABBILDUNG SEITE 8 Marie Denise Villers (1774–1821): Zeichnende junge Frau (Selbstporträt der Künstlerin?), 1801, Öl auf Leinwand, 161,3 x 128,6 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, online collection ABBILDUNG SEITE 10 Christiane Luise Duttenhofer (1776–1829): Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807) in ihrem Atelier in Rom, um 1804/1805, schwarzer Scherenschnitt, gelb hinterlegt, 20,9 x 17,3 cm. Marbach am Neckar, SchillerNationalmuseum und Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Inv.Nr. 5460. In: Güntter, Otto (Hg.): Aus klassischer Zeit, Scherenschnitte. Stuttgart/ Berlin 1937, Tf. 7 ABBILDUNG SEITE 19 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862) an der Staffelei sitzend, um 1852, Zeichnung, 16,7 x 10,3 cm. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Inv.Nr. NMH 18/2007 (Foto: Erik Cornelius / Nationalmuseum) DRUCK Media-Print Informationstechnologie GmbH, Paderborn Printed in EU ISBN 978-3-7319-0520-2 Inhalt 9 | Vorwort der Reihenherausgeber VORREDE 11 | ›Schattenfrauen‹ im Kunstbetrieb der Vormoderne. Einige einführende Schlaglichter auf ›blinde Flecken‹ fast fünfzig Jahre nach Nochlins WHTBNGWA Birgit Ulrike Münch BEITRÄGE 20 | Hofkünstlerinnen. Weibliche Karrierestrategien an den Höfen der Frühen Neuzeit Christina Strunck 38 | Makers: Towards the Study of Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts Tanja L. Jones 48 | Virtuous needleworkers, vicious apes: the embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick M A Katritzky 62 | Zunftmeisterin oder Ausgeschlossene? Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Mitarbeit von Frauen in den Malerwerkstätten der Vormoderne Danica Brenner 73 | Women, Art, and the Subversive Sampler in the Dutch Golden Age Martha Moffitt Peacock 89 | Rosalba Carriera: Neue Quellen und Erkenntnisse zu den Lebensumständen der „ersten Malerin Europas“ Heiner Krellig 111 | Die Künstlerinnen an der Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture 1648–1793: Eine Analyse im Lichte verschiedener Formen der Kunsttradierung Valentine von Fellenberg Inhalt | 5 133 | Künstlerfrauen des Settecento Veneziano: Angela Carriera Pellegrini, Angela Fontana Marieschi Albotto und Cecilia Guardi Tiepolo Heiner Krellig 154 | Handlungsräume von Berufskünstlerinnen in Paris jenseits der Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Sarah Salomon 170 | Caritas Romana: zu einem verlorengegangenen Gemälde Angelika Kauffmanns (1794) Jutta Gisela Sperling 182 | Ehefrau – Schwester – Lehrerin. Anna Dorothea Therbuschs Doppelbildnis in Kassel im Kontext unterschiedlicher Deutungen Justus Lange 199 | Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony, 1894–1905 Sabine Wieber 211 | Amazonen, Schwestern oder einfach nur Genossen? Russische Avantgardistinnen und ihre Bedeutung in Deutschland Elena Korowin 220 | Gentil’esca – Genderdekonstruktion bei Artemisia Gentileschi und Tracey Emin Tobias Lander 238 | Viten der Autorinnen und Autoren, Herausgeberinnen und Herausgeber Inhalt | 7 Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony, 1894–1905 Sabine Wieber In 1895, a group of landscape painters from the northern German village of Worpswede showcased their work at the Munich Glaspalast’s annual international art exhibition, which was organised by the Genossenschaft der Bildenden Künstler Münchens. The Genossenschaft was founded in 1868 and advocated for Munich artists’ interests. Most importantly, the association was in charge of putting on annual exhibitions of contemporary art since the academy had abdicated this responsibility in 1856.1 These exhibitions were large in scale and attracted artists from across Europe, thus capturing the attention of international critics and collectors alike. When the Worpswede painters first exhibited a small selection of their landscapes at the Bremer Kunsthalle in 1894, their critical reception was shatteringly negative. So it must have come as a surprise that the typically strict Munich jury allocated an entire room (Saal 23) to this relatively unknown, and even contested, group of artists.2 But the Worpswede painters ceased the opportunity and entered some of their now most iconic works such as Fritz Mackensen’s Gottesdienst im Freien (1893) and Otto Modersohn’s Sturm im Teufelsmoor (1895). Their Munich gambit paid off and Mackensen’s Courbet-inspired painting was awarded a first class gold medal while Modersohn’s landscape was directly purchased by the Bavarian State for Munich’s Neue Pinakothek (fig. 1).3 Saal 23 galvanised Germany’s leading art critics into writing feature-length essays on the Worpswede group that celebrated Mackensen and his fellow artists as revolutionising German landscape painting. In many ways, the 1895 Glaspalast exhibition signals the Worpswede painters’ entry into art history. Private and public collectors from across Europe started collecting their landscapes soon after the event and this group of painters continues to capture the art world’s attention to this day. Although the artists did not share a clearly identifiable style, critics and collectors saw their work as being rooted in a distinctly German notion of Heimat and regional identity.4 By 1900, Worpswede’s fame was such that Gustav Pauli, the then director of the Bremer Kunsthalle, brokered a deal between Rainer Maria Rilke (a regular visitor to Worpswede) and Velhagen & Klasing (one of Germany’s premier publishing houses) that produced a first monograph on Worpswede that was eventually published under Hermann Knackfuss’ editorship in 1903.5 Rilke’s monograph describes the day-to-day life at Worpswede and chronicles some of the artists’ colony’s struggles since its inception in 1894. Rilke only focused on the colony’s six founding members: Hans am Ende (1864–1918), Fritz Mackensen (1866–1953), Otto Modersohn (1865–1943), Fritz Overbeck (1869–1909), Karl Vinnen (1863–1922) and Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942). Regrettably, he failed to discuss any of Worpswede’s women artists, such as his own wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff (1878–1954) or the painters Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) and Ottilie Reylaender (1882–1965). This lacuna might in part be blamed on the demands of Rilke’s publisher. But it also signals larger gender biases operating at the time and, one could argue, still firmly in place today despite Paula Modersohn-Becker’s posthumous celebrity status. This essay intends to unveil some of Worpswede’s complex gender dynamics by focusing on one of the artists’ 1 | Otto Modersohn: Sturm im Teufelsmoor, 1895, oil on canvas, 116 x 85 cm. München, Neue Pinakothek Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony | 199 colony’s most prominent couples: Martha and Heinrich Vogeler. My research explores the intellectual and physical environments within which they lived and worked (Barkenhoff) in order to better understand how a distinctly gendered division of labour impacted not only Martha and Heinrich Vogeler’s respective cultural roles at Worpswede but also their historical reception for generations to come. The concept of the avant-garde group or community functions as an important construct in art historical discussions of the time period in question here. Artistic partnerships within modernism’s many complex cultural constellations have been examined from various analytical vantage points but gender has only recently been introduced into this discussion. In this context, feminist scholars are keen to scrutinise the charged connubial and professional relationships engendered by some of art history’s most iconic avant-garde couples. The art historian Bibiana Obler, for example, recently chose Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) to reveal the Blue Rider’s porous boundaries between painting (traditionally gendered as male) and the decorative arts (traditionally gendered as female).6 My essay aims to contribute to this body of scholarship by introducing Martha and Heinrich Vogeler and arguing that their hitherto overlooked artistic and connubial partnership made a worthy contribution to the articulation of distinctly German modernism. The Bremen-born and Dusseldorf-trained artist Heinrich Vogeler was a founding member of the Worpswede artists’ colony and is considered as a key figure in the articulation and dissemination of German Jugendstil. His wife Martha Vogeler (1879–1961), on the other hand, has been virtually forgotten despite her central role in Vogeler’s creative practice. After 1900, she also acted as one of Worpswede’s premier hostesses and eventually became the guardian of the artists’ colony’s cultural heritage long after its founding fathers had died or moved on. But rather than championing Martha Vogeler as an overlooked women artist (she was actually an accomplished weaver), my essay explores some of the ways in which the Vogelers’ romantic partnership between 1894 and 1905 opened up certain possibilities for female creativity and cultural contributions, but foreclosed others by re-inscribing traditional gender roles into the fabric of an ostensibly progressive artists’ colony. The Worpswede Artists’ Colony Before discussing the specifics of Martha and Heinrich Vogeler’s complex relationship, it is important to briefly situate these historical actors within the ideological and 200 | Sabine Wieber geographical contexts of the Worpswede artists’ colony. Worpswede undoubtedly represents one of Germany’s most famous late nineteenth-century artists’ colonies. This time period witnessed the burgeoning of these types of artistic communities across central Europe and North America.7 Artists’ colonies are either seasonal or permanent settlements of artists who relocated from urban centres into fairly remote, albeit still accessible, rural locations to live and work. The physical retreat from the bustling metropolis is meant to inspire creativity and nourish friendship ties. The first artists’ colonies emerged in France during the 1820s (e. g. Barbizon) but this phenomenon soon spread across Europe and North America. From the 1850s onwards, new railway networks opened up more remoted geographical locales for artists and subsequently enabled tourists to visit these sites and making important contributing to their economic viability.8 The art historian Nina Lübbren describes late nineteenthcentury artists’ colonies as complex “place-myths” that were characterised by “artists negotiating a representational and cultural terrain, admitting certain aspects of the environment and rejecting others, moving between the realities of a place, the ideal image of what that place should be like”.9 In Worpswede’s case, artists and their visitors processed their experiences of Worpswede’s geography through a lens of cultural expectations and hopes. Germany’s rapid nineteenth-century industrialisation and urbanisation nourished urban fantasies of virtually untouched stretches of natural beauty inhabited by native populations barely eking out a living but happily embracing age-old traditions and modes of existence. By tapping into this endless potential of an ›uncorrupted‹, i. e. preindustrial vernacular, artists believed that they could recharge their own creative potential. Rainer Maria Rilke falls victim to some of these stereotypes when describing Worpswede in 1903: “Nicht weit aber von jener Gegend, in welcher Philipp Otto Runge seinen Morgen gemalt hat, unter demselben Himmel sozusagen, liegt eine merkwürdige Landschaft, in der sich damals einige junge Leute zusammengefunden hatten, unzufrieden mit der Schule, sehnsüchtig nach sich selbst und willens, ihr Leben irgendwie in die Hand zu nehmen. Sie sind nicht mehr von dort fortgegangen, ja, sie haben es sogar vermieden, größere Reisen zu machen, immer bange, etwas zu versäumen, irgendeinen unersetzlichen Sonnenuntergang, irgendeinen grauen Herbsttag oder die Stunde, da nach stürmischen Nächten die ersten Frühlingsblumen aus der Erde kommen. Die Wichtigkeiten der Welt fielen ihnen ab und sie erfuhren jene große Umwertung aller Werte, die vor ihnen Constable erfah- ren hatte, der in einem Briefe schrieb: ‘Die Welt ist weit, nicht zwei Tage sind gleich, nicht einmal zwei Stunden; noch hat es seit Schöpfung der Welt zwei Baumblätter gegeben, die einander gleich waren.’ Ein Mensch, der zu dieser Erkenntnis gelangt, fängt ein neues Leben an. Nichts liegt hinter ihm, alles vor ihm und: ‘Die Welt ist weit’”.10 On one level, Rilke describes Worpswede’s renowned natural beauty: its stunning light, vast skies, saturated colours and unpopulated stretches of inhospitable moorland. But he was even more committed to extolling the Worpswede painters’ spiritual response to this specific landscape, which enabled them to find a new repertoire of motifs and modes of representation. In the long run, this discourse helped the Worpswede painters to carve out a market niche for their canvases by satisfying cultural expectations that had been mapped onto the region by the likes of Rilke. Worpswede was located circa thirty kilometres northeast of Bremen in a flat moorland known as the Teufelsmoor. For most of the nineteenth century, the region was sparsely populated but Worpswede’s connection to the Moorexpress railway and a national postal service opened up the area to tourism from the late 1880s onwards. The Dusseldorf landscape painter Fritz Mackensen founded the artists’ colony in 1894 after he had regularly visited the Teufelsmoor since 1889 to paint en plein air.11 Mackensen’s painter-friends Otto Modersohn and Hans am Ende soon followed suit and brought with them Heinrich Vogeler, Fritz Overbeck and Carl Vinnen. In 1894, the six painters established a year-round artists’ colony that differed from similar efforts across central Europe where artists usually only spent the summer months away from their urban studios. This was in part fuelled by the Worpswede painters’ desire to fully immerse themselves in the local community to generate new visual languages and artistic practices away from the institutional restraints of academies and the commercial art market. In reality, the Worpswede painters were of course funded by the sale of their works on the art market and actively encouraged collectors to visit them. But this is not necessarily a contradiction because the very definition of a colony is as a “group of people who settle in a new place but keep ties to their homeland”.12 Although founded by six male artists, Worpswede also hosted a number of female painters. They journeyed to Worpswede to enrol in Mackensen’s teaching studio, which was specifically targeted at female students. In late nineteenth-century Germany, women were still largely prohibited from entering the academic system and such private initiatives offered viable alternatives as well as lucrative income opportunities for academy-trained artists. 2 | Bruno Paul: Malweiber, caricature. In: Simplicissimus 6/ 15 (1901), 117 In Munich, for example, women were only admitted to the city’s Academy of Fine Arts after 1919. The sculptor Clara Westhoff, a temporary member of the Worpswede artists’ colony and future wife of Rainer Maria Rilke, clearly expressed her frustration at being rebuffed by the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1897: “Wenn der Staat sich verpflichtet fühlt, für die männlichen Künstler ganz ungeheure Unterstützungen zu leisten, warum tut er es nicht für die weiblichen?”13 Mackensen’s Worpswede studio or Munich’s Debschitz School (1902–14) filled this void and provided employment for male and female artists during a time of oversupply on the art market.14 The phenomenon of privately tutored women artists, so-called Malweiber, represented a bone of contention in Germany’s institutional art world and these ambitious women were regularly satirised in the contemporary press (fig. 2).15 Some of Worpswede’s Malweiber remained at the colony after completing their training and started their own studio practices. Paula Modersohn-Becker probably represented a most famous case in point: she arrived from Bremen in 1898 to study under Mackensen, married Otto Modersohn in 1901 and is today viewed as one of Worpswede’s most interesting and progressive artists. Her iconic nude selfportrait of 1906, for example, is often considered as art history’s first painting of this kind.16 Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony | 201 Heinrich and Martha Vogeler Vogeler must be considered as one of the most versatile artists at Worpswede. He was a painter, an architect, a designer and a prolific graphic artist and book illustrator. He was also one of the youngest artists at Worpswede and his œuvre differs from the colony’s renowned plein air landscapes in that his paintings and prints retained a focus on the human figure. Vogeler tended to employ nature as a setting for poetic storylines rather than focussing on the Teufelsmoor in and of itself. Today, Vogeler is known in German art history as one of Jugendstil’s premier Märchenmaler (painter of fairy tales) due to his love of myth, legend and the Middle Ages. Topics from these genres fuelled much of his creative imagination and provided endless inspiration for his work. Vogeler shared his fellow Worpswede painters’ dissatisfaction with Germany’s institutional art world, which he had experienced as a student at the Dusseldorf Academy. He entered the Dusseldorf Academy in 1890 and studied under the history painter Peter Janssen the Elder (1844–1908) and the architect / designer Adolf Schill (1848–1911). He bitterly complained in his autobiography, which was published posthumously, about the formulaic pedagogy at the academy: “Endloses Gipszeichnen nach der Antike […] ärgerte mich, stieß mich ab. […] Ich wollte beim Zeichnen fühlen, wie so ein Körper gewachsen ist. Nicht die malerische Erscheinung, sondern das Organische, den Bau, die Form suchte ich zu ergründen”.17 Shortly after his arrival at Worpswede, Heinrich Vogeler bought an old thatched farmhouse and named it ›Barkenhoff‹ after the many birch trees surrounding the site. He converted his property into a beautiful artists’ space complete with Jugendstil interiors and landscaped gardens (fig. 3). Barkenhoff offered Vogeler the once in a lifetime opportunity to create an ambitious Gesamtkunstwerk that realised his vision of a symbiosis of art and life, thus facilitating a much sought-after metaphysical unity of body and spirit. Barkenhoff soon became Worpswede’s hub of ›creative sociability‹, which is a term used by Lübbren to describe artists’ colonies as “cohesive social entities with shared rituals and commitments”,18 but which is applied here on a more micro-level to think about the Vogelers’ artistic and domestic spaces and practices. Vogeler fell in love with a young and beautiful village girl, Martha Schröder, not long after his move into the Barkenhoff. Although the two did not marry until 1901, it is my contention that Martha played a crucial part in generating the above mentioned ›creative sociability‹ as both her future husband’s muse and as Worpswede’s premier salonnière in charge of hosting Barkenhoff’s important, albeit short-lived, Sunday afternoons. Vogeler alludes to Martha’s central role at Barkenhoff when observing that “das Haus war wie meine Kunst ganz diesem Mädchen geweiht”.19 Vogeler’s Fairy Tale World Martha Schröder grew up in Worpswede and was only fourteen when she met Vogeler in 1894. Her father was the local village teacher and she had a basic education that was typical for her social position at the time. Her natural beauty drew Vogeler’s attention and she sat for a 3 | Barkenhoff, photographed by the author, Worpswede 2015 202 | Sabine Wieber 4 | Heinrich Vogeler: Martha von Hembarg, 1894, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 31.5 cm. Worpswede, Barkenhoff-Stiftung number of portraits before he cast her as a protagonist in his fairy tale canvases (fig. 4). It is unclear when exactly the two became a couple but their relationship metamorphosed from professional to romantic long before they were married on 3 March 1901. Their first daughter Marie Louise (1901–45) was born that year, followed by Bettina (1903–2001) and Martha (1905–95). After the birth of their last daughter, Martha started to embark on an artistic career of her own as a weaver and furniture designer. Tellingly, this coincided with a gradual breakdown of her marriage. Heinrich Vogeler served in World War I and trans- formed Barkenhoff into a communist collective not long after his return from the front. By this point in time, Martha had moved into her own home, the so-called Haus im Schluh, where she ran a weaving studio and became the guardian of Heinrich Vogeler’s estate. The property remains in the possession of the family and today accommodates the Worpswede archive, a small museum dedicated to Vogeler, a weaving studio and a bed and breakfast run by Martha’s great-granddaughter.20 Vogeler idolised the young Martha Schröder during their seven-year courtship spanning from 1894 to 1901. He was Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony | 203 enchanted by what he perceived to be her childlike innocence and lack of pretence: “Der Eindruck dieser jungen elastischen Mädchengestalt wirkte auf mich wie etwas tief in mein Leben Eingreifendes”.21 She became the lynchpin of a romantic dream world that Vogeler strove to create in real life and on his canvases. He used his bride-to-be to imbue his paintings and prints with a nostalgic longing for Germany’s medieval past complete with heroic knights, wandering minstrels and chaste ladies. Vogeler’s active engagement with fairy tales signals his embrace of a crossEuropean phenomenon art historians now label ›National Romanticism‹ (ca. 1890–1918), which was both a multi-national movement as well as a style with diverse regional manifestations. A critical discussion of National Romanticism exceeds the parameters of this essay, but it essentially denotes the revival in art, architecture and design of pre-industrial, vernacular design languages and mythopoetic images to generate a modern style that was both national (e. g. identifiably German) and international; nostalgic and utopian.22 In the context of painting and the graphic arts, fairy tales and myths were employed by National Romanticism’s adherents such as Vogeler to conjure up a shared past that was deliberately located outside the parameters of documented history. This enabled its advocates to circumnavigate the ideological and political baggage of concrete historical associations. National Romanticism thus offered Vogeler the opportunity to retreat into mythology, fairy tales and medieval legends, which he used to forge an emotional bond with his viewers. Vogeler’s desire to facilitate an emotionally charged, subjective experience aligns him with European Symbolism although he never exhibited with its German progenitors or articulated his position vis-à-vis this “alternative modernism”.23 It is my argument that Martha played a crucial role in Vogeler’s endeavours. She actively participated in the crafting of Vogeler’s deeply emotional and nostalgic visual language that ultimately launched his breakthrough as a modern artist. Carl Eeg’s 1898 photograph of Heinrich and Martha Vogeler shows them as equal stakeholders in this process. They are both dressed up as figures from the medieval court and the (imagined) plot of chivalry and eternal love can only be sustained by their mutual presence. Vogeler has been called Germany’s William Morris due to his diverse artistic outputs, his embrace of English Arts and Crafts principles, and his ultimate desire to bridge the gap between the applied and fine arts. Martha on the other hand, has been virtually written out of art historical discourses on Worpswede, on Heinrich Vogeler and on German Jugendstil in general. But their artistic and connubial relationship deserves our attention because Martha played a pivotal role in Vogeler’s transition from mediocre 204 | Sabine Wieber landscape painter to pioneering Jugendstil artist and designer. Even Rilke, in his gender-biased biography of Worpswede, acknowledged Martha’s importance: “Sie machten zusammen weite Wege ins Moor, traten in die Hütten ein, und kaum war man da beisammen und sprach, hatte Martha Schröder, indem sie etwas schaffte, [sich] immer schon irgendwie in das Interieur eingefügt […]. Und so trat sie auch bald in Vogelers Bilder ein. Er hatte bis dahin immer wilde, fremde Dinge gezeichnet […]. Sie machte ihn nun einfach mit einem Mal. Zeigte ihm das Land, in dem er sie träumerisch zu feiern begann. So erhob sich ihre Gemeinsamkeit aus seinem Selbstwerden”.24 Rethinking the Muse When surveying the art historical literature on Heinrich Vogeler, one is struck by the persistent mention of Martha as Vogeler’s inspiration. It is fascinating to note in this context that the obvious term to describe Martha would be Vogeler’s Muse. But the concept does not figure into art historical scholarship on Vogeler or Worpswede. This warrants rectification but first a brief analysis of the Muse as an ontological category is necessary so as to not confuse Martha’s role with that of a model. The search for the origins of artistic creation and, by extension, creativity has long occupied philosophers. The ancient Greeks conjured up the nine Muses of Mount Helicon as a means through which to explore the complex relationship between inspiration, imagination and creation. The poet Hesiod, a coeval of Homer, first named the nine Muses in his epic poem Theogony (ca. 700 BC). This poem describes the origins of the cosmos, the genealogies of the gods and some of the important founding myths around them.25 According to Hesiod, the Muses were conceived as daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory) over nine consecutive nights. They are nymphlike, live on Mount Helicon, and are guided by the Olympian deity Apollo. Apollo is regularly portrayed in the visual arts as being surrounded by the nine beautiful Muses, each bearing her identifying attribute.26 Hesiod writes that the Muses breathed a divine voice into the poet that enabled him to sing of the past and the future: “The ready-spoken daughter of great Zeus had this to say, And gave me a staff that they had plucked, a branch of flowering bay, A wondrous thing? And breathed a god-inspired voice in me, That I might celebrate the things that were and that shall be; And bade me hymn the race of those who always are, the blessed, But make my song be always of themselves, both first and last”.27 This excerpt from Theogony leaves no doubt that the Muses inspire the poet and imbue him with the ability to sing to his fellow mortals. They thus function as seminal intermediaries of divine knowledge and their authority must not be disputed. Without the Muses, the poet remains mute. The Swiss Hellenist Claude Calame summarised this dynamic when writing that “the utterance of the enunciation is characterised by the projection of the ‘I’ of the narrator onto a higher authority, an authority assumed by the figure of the Muse or the Muses”.28 Although the Muses represent the ultimate authorities, the poet, according to Hesiod, continues to play an active part in the creative process. This changes under Plato who posits the poet as a passive and even irrational instrument of the Muses who ›creates‹ in a state of frenzied madness or ecstasy. In Plato’s model, the poet is part of a chain of creativity that filters down from the Muse to the audience. For Plato, the poet does not understand what he is saying and it is the philosopher rather than the poet who becomes the true servant of the Muse(s). The complex relationship between Muse and poet / artist goes through a series of further iterations over the coming centuries, which cannot be discussed here. Suffice to say that by the end of the nineteenth century, the Muse virtually lost all of her agency and individuality. Indeed, gender historians have argued that the Muses’ many features, names and representations in effect overshadowed their individuality.29 Today, art historians evoke the muse (notably no longer spelled with a capital ›M‹ that once signified specific individuals) to describe a predominantly female, although occasionally male, individual who serves as an artist’s source of inspiration – be he a painter, a writer or a musician. The relationship between artist and muse tends to be conceived as intuitive and visceral. Despite her retention of influence in the creative process, the muse is rarely acknowledged as an active historical actor and the relationship between artist and muse remains clouded in myth and melodrama. The deeply fraught artistic and connubial entanglement between Pablo Picasso and Olga Khokhlova (1891–1955), for example, is periodically revived to underscore the stereotypical constellation of prodigious artist and his fragile muse.30 For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the muse functioned as a handmaiden of beauty, an inspirer of art and knowledge, a goddess of song and story, but she was ultimately shaped by masculine creativity. Hesiod’s once powerful agent of creativity thus metamorphosed into an overtly sexualised motif with little or no agency. For much of western art, the muse represented an inspirational but ultimately passive archetype whose identity was shaped by predominantly male artists. Rethinking Martha’s Role as Vogeler’s Muse In a thought provoking albeit rather simplistic essay on The Role of the Artists’ Muse published in 2008, the notorious Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer attempts to tease apart the difference between model and muse. Greer published this piece on occasion of the spectacular sale of Lucian Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1994), which commanded £17.2 million and broke previous records for the artist’s work.31 The painting represents Freud’s sitter Sue Tilley sprawled naked across a couch. Freud painted Tilley four more times and nicknamed her ›Fat Sue‹. This launched Tilley into the spotlight and she has since posed (fully clothed) next to her portrait, which attests to our on-going fascination with comparing portrait and portrayed. Greer argues in her essay that Tilley simply “lay heaped on a sofa with her eyes shut while he [Freud] painted her”.32 This, according to Greer did not make her Freud’s muse since a muse is “anything but a paid model [because] she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of his mind”.33 True historical muses in Greer’s view were, for example, Emilie Flöge (Gustav Klimt) and Gala (Salvador Dalí). This draws attention to an important question, namely, when does a model become a muse and can, or should, we be able to actually differentiate between the two? This is a loaded question and the answer is contingent on how historians position themselves in relation to their understanding of the construction of historical subjectivities. On a most simplistic level, and based on the above discussion of Hesiod, the muse emerges as a more active historical actor than the model. But these varied levels of activity are difficult to ascertain given the lack of archival records on the day-to-day lives of women throughout history. In addition, historians must be careful when deconstructing gendered performances of ›muse‹ and ›model‹ because both roles are so deeply vested in historically specific expectations. Keeping these complex issues in mind, I hope to convince readers of this essay that Martha Vogeler indeed occupied the role of Vogeler’s muse rather than simply his model because she not only imbued Vogeler’s work with important creative possibilities, but she also generated a cultural environment at Barkenhoff that fuelled Worpswede’s artistic vitality as a whole. It is a well-known fact that the young Martha Schröder inhabited many of Heinrich Vogeler canvases and print cycles during the early years of their courtship. She starred Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony | 205 as the child-like aesthetic heroine of Vogeler’s romantic fairy tales and medieval fantasies. Her fair complexion, even features, blond hair, and youthful slender figure naturally lend itself to the artist’s emotionally charged tales of love, loyalty and chivalry. Vogeler’s iconic representation of Spring, which he executed as a painting and several prints, for example, features a clearly identifiable Martha as the protagonist (fig. 5). Indeed, his subject’s costume reappears in Vogeler’s visual œuvre a number of times and it actually represents a piece of clothing in Martha’s wardrobe that she regularly wore to dress up for her sessions with Vogeler. Carl Eeg’s aforementioned photograph, for example, shows Martha’s costume as virtually identical with her sleeve pattern and high-waisted skirt in Vogeler’s Frühling. A more conventional art historical reading of these works might cast Martha as Vogeler’s passive model whose beauty and youth were simply ›translated‹ by the artist. But might Martha actually have asserted her own creativity and artistically shaped these works through the ways in which she styled herself? Recent scholarship in dress and textile history draws attention to the idea that a particular look or style is always carefully constructed and consciously expressed through dress, hair, make-up, jewellery etc.34 ›Styling‹ therefore represents a creative act in and of itself. Martha did not simply put on a dress to model for Vogeler but she styled herself like any stage actor does in preparation for his or her role in a play. In order to mentally and physically occupy her character in Vogeler’s narrative, Martha paid close attention to her hair, to her jewellery and to the way in which she put together her bodice, blouse and dress. She literally stepped into Vogeler’s canvas as a medieval subject but what this subject looked like was largely left to Martha’s own imagination and initiative. She thus played a much more active role in Vogeler’s œuvre than has previously been acknowledged. The Vogelers’ creative collaboration also signals their awareness of late nineteenth-century dress reform movements in England and Germany, and its protagonists’ embrace of artistic dress and historical pageantry. The fruitful interaction between Jane Morris (née Jane Burden) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, documented in so many photographs by John Robert Parsons, springs to mind here. Dress reform ideas were largely circulated through female networks, magazine culture and fashion houses / department stores. The point I am making is simple but bears thinking about: ›styled‹ female protagonists enacted important roles in late nineteenth-century art and actively contributed to the formulation of a modern language in art and design. This interpretation is only possible if we accept the idea that a single maker has often been wrongly credited in lieu of a historically more accurate process of shared 206 | Sabine Wieber authorship and production. And yet, art historical discussions of these collaborations have consistently sidelined female stakeholders such as Martha Vogeler as passive muses instead of active collaborators.35 Sunday Afternoons at Barkenhoff While serving as Vogeler’s muse, Martha made a second important contribution to the Worpswede artists’ colony as a whole. She hosted regular Sunday afternoon socials at Barkenhoff for an exclusive group of painters and writers, the so-called Worpsweder Kreis. This circle was particularly active between 1900 and 1902. Martha’s Sunday afternoons offered a crucial intellectual and physical space for lively cultural exchanges. Members included the Vogelers, the Modersohns, Rilke and Clara Westhoff as well as Carl Hauptmann (1858–1921) and Paula Modersohn’s sister Milly. The poet Rudolf A. Schröder (1878–1962), the writer Otto Julius Bierbaum also known under his pseudonym Martin Möbius (1865–1910), the theatre / film director Max Reinhardt (1873– 1943) and the publisher Eugen Diederichs (1867–1930) counted themselves amongst the Worpsweder Kreis’ more infrequent participants since they did not live at the colony. Guests arrived at Barkenhoff every Sunday wearing elegant dress and were escorted into the white hall (Weißer Saal) for tea and cake. They often stayed well into the evening making music, reading poetry and discussing aesthetics. The group also went on occasional excursions and visited exhibitions in nearby Bremen.36 Paula Becker observed in a letter to one of her aunts Marie that the Worpsweder Kreis considered itself a family: “Wir nennen uns: die Familie”.37 Indeed, three marriages emerged from this ›family‹: Martha and Heinrich, Clara and Rilke, Paula and Otto. They all married in the spring and summer of 1901. Clara Westhoff and Paula Modersohn-Becker became lifelong friends (until Paula’s tragic death of a suspected embolism in 1907) and supporters of one another’s work. Martha never felt quite accepted by the Worpsweder Kreis despite her key role as its facilitator. Not only was she younger than the other women in the group, but she also lacked their social backgrounds and education (urban upper middle classes). She expressed her frustration in an undated letter to Heinrich as follows: “Es thut mir unsagbar weh, von Ihnen zu hören, ob meine Liebe bleiben würde. Die haben Sie doch wohl oft genug auf die Probe gestellt, wenn Sie im Winter die Gesellschaft der Malerinnen vorzogen und mit mir kein Wort, wenigstens kein ernstes Wort gesprochen?”38 But this quote also signals Martha’s emotionally charged rebellion against being perceived as a naïve local girl. In reality, she stood little chance to escape this image given that Heinrich Vogeler continued to represent her as his fairy tale princess in paint and print. Martha undertook two separate study trips to Berlin and Dresden (1898 and 1899). Vogeler financed these sojourns because he recognised that village gossip over their relationship began to take its toll on Martha. Whilst away, Martha received the kind of informal education typical of a late nineteenthcentury middle class girl, which included tuition in a musical instrument (typically the piano), a foreign language (typically French) and general etiquette. Martha really enjoyed her studies and remarked: “Ich bin jetzt so glücklich, dass ich lernen darf, was ich schon immer wollte”.39 It is a shame that she had to return to Worpswede where she quickly reverted to the classed and gendered patterns of behaviour that had marked her previous relationship with Vogeler and the other members of the Worpswede artists’ colony. Female friendship represented a pivotal nineteenth-century social construct and its lofty ambitions provided the blueprint for many famous literary encounters. Friendships between (suppressed) women artists have long fascinated art historians and Renate Berger constructively explores the multiple facets of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s short but intense friendship with Clara Westhoff.40 Janina Kringe’s excellent dissertation on the Worpsweder Kreis takes a more widely scoped approach to the topic and investigates the ways in which this particular group of men and women drew on Biedermeier codes of behaviour to form an exclusive community that actually set them apart from Worpswede’s founding principles rooted in more progressive life reform ideologies. Martha and Heinrich’s insistence on a formal dress code, a regular location (Barkenhoff’s white hall), and a consistent order of events (afternoon tea, recital, conversation) anchors Martha’s salon in a cultural landscape that was closely aligned with contemporary perceptions of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Kringe describes the dynamic as follows: “Der ‘weisse Saal’ des Barkenhoff bietet dem Worpsweder Kreis eine Art Mikrokosmos, einen insulären Ort der Zuflucht, der seinem exklusiven Charakter Rechnung trägt: Bewusst künstlerisch inszeniert und abgeschlossen von der Außenwelt, bildet er das geeignete Fundament für eine ästhetische Erfahrung von Musik, Literatur und geistigem Austausch. […] Experimente und Entgleisungen, wie es parallel existierende Gruppierungen der Bohème aufweisen, haben im Mikrokosmos des Barkenhoff um 1900 keinen Platz”.41 In other words, Sunday afternoons at Barkenhoff encompassed idyllic utopias rather than experimental laboratories. 5 | Heinrich Vogeler: Frühling, 1897, oil on canvas, 175 x 150 cm. Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung und Waldemar Koch Stiftung, Dauerleihgabe an das Haus im Schluh, Worpswede Despite these inherent tensions, it is important to reiterate that the young Martha was in charge of the Worpsweder Kreis’ Sunday afternoons. While not quite ›a room of her own‹ in Virginia Woolf’s sense of the term, the physical and ideological parameters of these Sunday afternoons imbued Martha Vogeler with the opportunity to create a sphere of action (Handlungsraum) that embodied her imprint for all attendees to see and experience. It would therefore be short sighted to underestimate Martha’s influence on Vogeler’s artistic development and, by extension, on Worpswede’s rich cultural landscape. Unfortunately, the Worpsweder Kreis started to disintegrate with Rilke’s move to Paris in 1902 to write a biography of his artistic hero Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). Rilke not only turned his back on Heinrich Vogeler, who had been one of his most ardent financial and artistic supporters, but he also left behind a way of life that had been intimately tied to Worpswede, including his new wife Clara Westhoff and their child. The Worpsweder Kreis could not absorb Rilke’s betrayal and other members soon relocated into neighbouring villages or returned to their former urban lives. Although some, including Rilke, stayed in touch through letters, the intimacy and intellectual connection that had once driven the Worpsweder Kreis was irretrievably lost. Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony | 207 6 | Heinrich Vogeler: Sommerabend (Das Konzert), 1905, oil on canvas, 175 x 306 cm. Worpswede, Große Kunstschau, Land Niedersachsen, Kulturstiftung Landkreis Osterholz Conclusion Vogeler’s 1905 painting Sommerabend signals the end of the idyllic world he had tried to create at Barkenhoff (fig. 6). As Martha developed into a more self-assured woman as a mother and an emerging artist, her husband’s delicate fantasy world began to crumble. His fairy princess literally stepped out of his canvases and he struggled to find an appropriate visual language for Martha in her new role as his wife and mother of his children. Although Sommerabend offers a wonderful snapshot of some of Worpswede’s key members such as Paul Modersohn-Becker, Agnes Wulf, Otto Modersohn, Clara Westhoff and the Vogelers, it also divulges a fissure within this circle of friends. Vogeler, consciously or not, positioned Martha slightly removed from the group and about to step through a still closed gate. She is deeply lost in thought and her gaze wanders off into the distance. At her feet lies her loyal Saluki dog who adds a note of melancholy to the scene because it draws further attention to Martha’s remove from the close-knit group of artists behind her. It is as though her dog is her only loyal companion. This painting becomes a powerful reminder of a community in transition. Vogeler’s Muse has no longer the power to inspire him and his creativity is in crisis. As Martha longs to step through the gate, the Vogeler’s marriage is about to break down and the Worpsweder Kreis irretrievably resolved with the death of Paula Modersohn-Becker two years later. Looking back at her life with Vogeler, Martha sadly 208 | Sabine Wieber summed up their relationship: “Eines weiss ich, was auch kommen mag, nie werde ich mit dir leben, nie, nie! Du hast keine Zeit fürs Leben, bist ein Märtyrer deiner Kunst und fühlst dich noch wohl dabei”.42 At first glance, the Worpswede artists’ colony seems to have realised the Life Reform movement’s utopian vision of an intellectual and physical meeting place of equal stakeholders (male and female). Martha and Heinrich Vogeler’s creative and romantic relationship might not signal a conventional artistic collaboration that can be traced through a clearly identifiable œuvre. And yet, their contemporaries thought of Martha and Heinrich as one of Worpswede’s iconic artist couples (Künstlerehepaar); a term that clearly warrants expansion to accommodate different types of collaborative endeavours between husbands and wives. But Martha and Heinrich’s relationship ultimately re-inscribed separate valuations of male and female spheres of creativity and domesticity respectively. As Martha transitioned from an innocent village girl to Vogeler’s wife and mother of his children, her creative input into Vogeler’s œuvre diminished. To return to Hesiod, Vogeler appeared to be unable to hear his Muse sing. Ironically, Martha discovers her own creative voice in the process and moves on to become a designer in her own right. Sadly though, my case study of Martha and Heinrich Vogeler reaffirms what feminist art historians have long argued, namely, that late nineteenth-century women attempted to alter the capacities and shape of modernism, but that ultimately, modernism refused to make room for them. NOTES Note to the reader: Quotes and names from primary sources have purposely been left in the original German. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 It should be noted that by 1895, the Genossenschaft was under increasing pressure from a rival artists’ group, the recently founded Verein Bildender Künstler Münchens or Sezession (1892) whose members were unhappy with the Glaspalast’s large and increasingly unwieldy exhibitions. CAT.EXH.: Katalog. Modersohn’s painting has been lost since the Second World War and was last known to hang in General Hartmann’s offices in Munich’s Friedrichstraße. See, http://www.lostart.de/DE/Verlust/451586 (9. August 2016). MÜLLER-BRAUEL: Worpswede. RILKE: Worpswede. OBLER: Collaborations. Gerhard WIETEK: Künstlerkolonien is one of the first historians to pay close attention to this phenomenon in Germany (1976). For a discussion of the links between tourism and artists’ colonies see BARRETT: Artists. LÜBBREN: Colonies, 115. RILKE: Worpswede, 15. Pleinairism is difficult to define because it encompassed multiple approaches that ranged from paintings entirely executed out of doors to oil sketches made en plain air but converted into finished paintings in the studio. While we think of it today as a fairly conventional mode of late nineteenth-century representation, many critics in Wilhelmine Germany considered it radical, French-inspired and threating to German culture. OXFORD DICTIONARY: Dictionary, 341. Westhoff quoted in SCHLAFFER: Paare, 118f. Robin Lenman wrote about Munich’s and Berlin’s “artists’ proletariat” in his important publication on the German art market. LENMAN: Artists. 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 CAT.EXH.: München. RADYCKI: Paula. Vogeler quoted in GROTH/ HERMANN: Mythos, 25. LÜBBREN: Colonies, 17. ARNOLD: Rilke, n. p. See, http://www.worpswede-museen.de/haus-im-schluh/ haus-im-schluh.html (19. July 2016). VOGELER: Werden, 32. LANE: Romanticism; WIEBER: Warp. LEVENSON: Modernism, 124. KRINGE: Erfahrung, 158. GANTZ: Myth. They are: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (music), Erato (love poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy). HESIOD: Theogony, 30–35. CALAME: Craft, 77. For example, BRONFEN: Body, 364f. or KEITH: Rome, 109. Their relationship is once again explored in a current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. CAT.EXH.: Picasso. The painting recently broke records for Freud’s work yet again when selling for £38.8 million at Christie’s New York in 2015. GREER: Role, n. p. GREER: Role, n. p. CALVERT: Fashioning. HELLAND: Collaboration. KRINGE: Erfahrung, 156–165. BUSCH/ REINKEN: Paula, 297. M. Vogeler quoted in KRINGE: Erfahrung, 162. KRINGE: Erfahrung, 161. BERGER: Leben. KRINGE: Erfahrung, 179–181. VOGELER: Werden, 179. BIBLIOGRAPHY ARNOLD, Beate: Rilke und Barkenhoff. Heinrich Vogeler Gesellschaft, 2003. https://www.heinrich-vogeler.net/rilke-und-der-barkenhoff/ (25.07.2016). BARRETT, Brian Dudley: Artists on the Edge, The Rise of Coastal Artists’ Colonies, 1880–1920. Amsterdam 2010. BERGER, Renate: „Geht denn das Leben nicht, wie wir sechs es uns einst dachten?“, Zum Thema Freundschaft in Worpswede. In: Klein, Christiane/ Merle, Ulla/ Threuter, Christina (Eds.): Visuelle Repräsentanz und soziale Wirklichkeit: Bild, Geschlecht und Raum in der Kunstgeschichte, Festschrift für Ellen Spickernagel. Herbolzheim 2001, 82–95. BRONFEN, Elizabeth: Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. New York 1992. BUSCH, Günter/ REINKEN, Lieselotte von (Eds.): Paula Modersohn-Becker in Briefen und Tagebüchern. Frankfurt a. M. 2007. CALAME, Claude: The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece. Ithaca 1995. CALVERT, Robyne: Fashioning the Artist, Artistic Dress in Victorian Britain 1848–1900. Diss., University of Glasgow 2012. C AT.EXH.: Ab nach München! Künstlerinnen um 1900. München, Stadtmuseum. Munich 2015. CAT.EXH.: Illustrierter Katalog der Münchener Jahresausstellung von Kunstwerken aller Nationen im königlichen Glaspalast. München, Glaspalast. Munich 1895. CAT.EXH.: Picasso, The Artist and his Muses. Vancouver Art Gallery. Vancouver 2016. GANTZ, Timothy: Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore 1996. GREER, Germaine: The Role of the Artist’s Muse. In: The Guardian Newspaper, 02.06.2008. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jun/02/theroleoftheartistsmuse (26.07.2016). GROTH, Katharina/ HERMANN, Björn (Eds.): Mythos und Moderne, 125 Jahre Künstlerkolonie Worpswede. Cologne 2014. Martha Vogeler and the Worpswede Artists’ Colony | 209 HELLAND, Janice: Collaboration among the Four. In: Kaplan, Wendy (Ed.): Charles Rennie Mackintosh. New York 1996, 89–113. HESIOD: Theogony. Transl. by Catherine M. Schlegel and Henry Weinfield. Ann Arbor 2006. KEITH, Alison: Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic. Cambridge 2000. KRINGE, Janina: Ästhetische Erfahrung im Teufelsmoor? Künstlerische Lebensformen um 1900: der Worpsweder Kreis. Diss., Universität Siegen 2012. LANE, Barbara Miller: National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries. Cambridge 2000. LENMAN, Robin: Artists and Society in Germany 1850–1914. Manchester 1997. LEVENSON, Michael: Modernism. New Haven 2011. LÜBBREN, Nina: Rural Artists’ Colonies in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1870–1910. New Brunswick 2001. MÜLLER-BRAUEL, Hans: Worpswede und die Worpsweder. In: Die Kunst unserer Zeit 7/ II (1896), 105–122. OBLER, Bibiana: Intimate Collaborations, Kandinsky & Münter, Arp & Taeuber. New Haven/ London 2014. OXFORD DICTIONARY: Oxford Dictionary of English. 2nd Ed., Oxford 2003. RADYCKI, Diane: Paula Modersohn-Becker, The First Modern Woman Artist. New Haven 2013. RILKE, Rainer Maria: Worpswede, Monographie einer Landschaft und ihrer Maler. Bielefeld and Leipzig 1903. SCHLAFFER, Hannelore: Paare in Worpswede. In: Jahrbuch für finnischdeutsche Literaturbeziehungen 32 (2000), 116–128. VOGELER, Heinrich: Werden, Erinnerung, Mit Lebenszeugnissen aus den Jahren 1923–1942. Ed. by Priewe, Joachim/ Wenzlaff, PaulGerhard. Fischerhude 1989. WIEBER, Sabine: The Warp & the Weft, Tradition and Innovation in Skærbæk Tapestries 1896–1903. In: Journal of Design History 28/ 4 (2015), 331–347. WIETEK, Gerhard (Ed.): Deutsche Künstlerkolonien und Künstlerorte. Munich 1976. PICTURE CREDITS Abb. 1: www.lostart.de/DE/Verlust/451586 (08.02.2017); Abb. 2: Simplicissimus 6/ 15 (1901), 117 http://www.simplicissimus.info/ index.php?id=6&tx_lombkswjournaldb_pi1%5Bvolume%5D=7&tx_lombkswjournaldb_pi1%5Baction%5D=showVolume&tx_lombkswjournaldb_pi1%5Bcontroller%5D=YearRegister&cHash=171f568d7c88139e4d3cf0bd00ca1e04 (08.02.2017); Abb. 3: © Author; Abb. 4: GROTH/ HERMANN: Mythos, 99; Abb. 5: GROTH/ HERMANN: Mythos, 180, Abb.2; Abb. 6: © Kulturstiftung Landkreis Osterholz, Worpswede 210 | Sabine Wieber