Werefkin Marianne von Pioneer of Expressionism
Marianne von Werefkin
pioneer of expressionism
MUSEUM DE FUNDATIE | WAANDERS PUBLISHERS, ZWOLLE
Acknowledgments
In collaboration with Fondazione Marianne Werefkin
Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona
Lenders
Artrust, Melano, Switzerland
Collectie WB - ULM
Folini Arte
Fondazione Matasci per Arte
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München
Schloßmuseum Murnau
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam Museum Wiesbaden
Kunsthaus Zürich
The Kasser Mochary Family Foundation Montclair
Beatrice von Bormann
Mara Folini Ceccarelli
Foreword
Russian period
Marianne von Werefkin: Artist and Outsider
Munich
Der Blaue Reiter
Sketchbooks
Beatrice von Bormann
Leiko Ikemura
The sketches of Marianne von Werefkin on werefkin
Traveling in the 1910s
Saint-Prex, Zürich
Roman Zieglgänsberger
detail, p. 47
Foreword
Marianne von Werefkin – Pioneer of Expressionism provides a unique opportunity to finally introduce the work of one of the most extraordinary makers of the 20th century to the Netherlands. Her work is not so well known in this country, as it has rarely been exhibited here. Museum de Fundatie is the only Dutch museum with a work by Werefkin in its collection. The small gouache was the catalyst for this first survey exhibition of Werefkin’s work at a Dutch museum, created in collaboration with the Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Ascona, which has stewardship of her estate.
Marianne von Werefkin was dubbed the Russian Rembrandt at the age of just twenty. A student of the famous Russian realist Ilya Repin, she initially painted in the same style. The fact that women were not allowed to attend art school in her day did not stop her, but inequality in the art world led her, for many years, to devote much of her time to supporting her partner, the painter Alexej von Jawlensky. She herself remained in the background, convinced that, as a female artist, she had no chance of success. Yet from 1906 onwards Werefkin played a key role in the development of expressionism in Germany. Not only was her ‘pink salon’ in Munich a meeting place for the avant-garde of the day, it was also where the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (‘New Artists’ Association Munich’) was founded, leading to the emergence of Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’) in 1911/12. Werefkin’s fellow painters, including Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Jawlensky, became much better known. The other female artist in this group, Gabriele Münter, also gained recognition much later. It was Werefkin who, between 1896 and 1906, studied modern and older painting styles, set up a painting laboratory in Munich, and stimulated debate about painting. When she travelled she brought back knowledge of the latest developments in Italy and France. This made her one of the driving forces behind the unique form of expressionism that is known today by the name Der Blaue Reiter. After Werefkin was forced to flee to Switzerland at the start of the First World War, in 1914, she continued to play an important role in cultural networks there. In 1924, for example, she set up the artists’ association Der Große Bär (‘The Big Bear’) in Ascona, along with Otto van Rees and other artists.
In a series of essays and other texts, this book gives a multifaceted impression of the life, work and significance of Werefkin. Mara Folini Ceccarelli has produced a deep analysis of Werefkin’s oeuvre, spanning her entire career as an artist. Her contribution highlights the exceptional and progressive nature of her work, and its significance in the art world of her own day, and now. Roman Zieglgänsberger, curator of classic modern art at Museum Wiesbaden, has written a text about Werefkin’s time in Munich, her role as part of Der Blaue Reiter and how she focused on the lives of women and workers in her art. Artist Leiko Ikemura has produced a glorious poetic homage to Werefkin. I myself have focused on Werefkin’s sketchbooks, in which all the innovative power of her work is apparent, and which show a different side of the artist.
I cannot thank our colleagues at Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Ascona – director Mara Folini Ceccarelli, curator Michela Zucchoni and registrar Ursina Fasani – enough for their fantastic support for this exhibition, which would not have been possible without the exceptionally large number of loans from the museum. I would also like to thank all other lenders, Artrust, Melano, Switzerland, Collection WB-ULM, Folini Arte, the Fondazione Matasci per Arte, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Schlossmuseum Murnau, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunsthaus Zürich, The Kasser Mochary Family Foundation,, and all private lenders for their generosity. Thanks also to Galerie Thomas, Ketterer Kunst and Galerie Kornfeld Auktionen for mediating the loans. Huge gratitude to Sanne van de Kraats for her support with the exhibition and for editing this catalogue. Thanks to all authors, without whom we would not have been able to deepen our understanding of Werefkin so much. Thanks also to Marloes Waanders and designer Harald Slaterus for their collaboration on the production of this catalogue. Thank you to the entire team of the museum for their hard work on the preparations of the exhibition. Many thanks to our financial supporters, Zwolle municipal council and Overijssel provincial authority, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, de VriendenLoterij lottery and the friends and founders of our museum. We are also grateful to Pieter and Françoise Geelen of the Turing Foundation for their generous support for the exhibition. It is thanks to the contributions of all these people that we have been able to put together this unique exhibition and this beautiful book.
Beatrice von Bormann Director, Museum de Fundatie
Russian period
Portrait of Alexej von Jawlensky 1896
Oil on canvas
42.8 x 24.7 cm
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München
Oil on canvas
69 x 51 cm
Collezione Comune di Ascona, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona, FMW 001
Oil on canvas
69 x 51 cm
Permanent loan from the PSM Privatstiftung Schloßmuseum Murnau at the Schloßmuseum Murnau, inv. no. 11664, Schloßmuseum Murnau Bildarchiv
Portrait of Vera Repin
Ilja Repin Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin 1888
Oil on canvas
60 x 51 cm
Museum Wiesbaden
Photo: Museum Wiesbaden / Bernd Fickert
Marianne von Werefkin,
1889 © Bildarchiv PSM Privatstiftung Schloßmuseum Murnau
Marianne von Werefkin: Artist and Outsider
The work of Marianne von Werefkin is not universally well known, particularly in comparison with her contemporaries, and especially her fellow Russian Wassily Kandinsky (Moscow, RU, 1866-1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, FR). He has been elevated to the status of undisputed father of abstract art, the revolutionary movement that opened up new horizons for modern art. In our idealistic culture of progress, the development of art is seen as a progressive line of continual renewal, in which all that went before is disparaged or labelled obsolete. Ultimately, anything that deviates from the norm of progress is mercilessly silenced, undervalued or discredited.
Yet Werefkin expressly chose to remain an ‘outsider’. She felt that an artist who wanted to change history and follow a new, elevating, spiritual path on which they felt at one with the cosmos should not withdraw from reality by placing their own ideal above the normal course of things. They must come to terms with that reality through empathy and responsibility. In this perspective, artists attempt to capture the essence of their feelings – their inner needs and desires – through self-examination, and express that essence through reality as it appears, to give it eloquence. The artist has to seek to transform events into images of great aesthetic and ethical value, in synthetic shapes, colours and lines, which have a cleansing effect and waken the viewer, confronting them with the fundamental questions of the age and of the human condition in general. This generates feelings, universal emotions that are evidence of true humanity, an ideal one can strive for, which gives direction and purpose to life, and which transcends the grey, alienating, everyday reality.
Marianne von Werefkin was a forerunner of the art of emotion. In her liberated visual idiom, colours exist for themselves and create order, in synthetic forms and emotional figures that express the inner life of the artist, appearing in dynamic compositions that conform to the laws of painting: symmetry, contrast, agreement between colours. For Werefkin it was not a matter of ‘what the eye sees’ but ‘what the soul feels’.1 She yearned for imaginative creativity that transcended everyday reality, but which also empathised with humankind, in its need for salvation from a dire existence devoid of ideals. According to Werefkin, to ‘stimulate life’, one must be ‘firmly rooted in it’ and if one is not to risk referring to oneself and becoming detached from social and existential issues, one must not run away from life but know how to ‘love it’2, with compassion and foresight.
From Russia to Munich
Marianne von Werefkin was the daughter of Vladimir Werefkin, commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and icon painter Elizaveta P. Daragan, of aristocratic Cossack heritage. As a child, she lived wherever her father was stationed. She thus spent her early years in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the family owned a large estate called Blagodat (happiness, trans.), and her youth in Lublin (now in Poland) and St. Petersburg. From 1880, she was taught by Ilya Repin (Chuhuiv, UA, 18441930, Sint-Petersburg, RU), the master of Russian Realism. From 1893 to 1895 she lived in Moscow, where she studied at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.
There, Werefkin immediately showed her strength of character. She rejected the principles of the aristocracy in which she had been raised, and stood up for the most marginalised people in Russian society, including serfs, black people and Jews. She shared the humane, positivist ideas of the artistic movement known as Peredvizhniki (The Itinerants), who campaigned for the education and emancipation of the Russian people. She successfully exhibited her large oil paintings with them, earning herself the nickname of ‘the Russian Rembrandt’ because of the dark colours and mysterious light in her work, as in her extraordinary Self-Portrait, in which we can already discern cautiously impressionist forms, in the subtle light that makes the colours more intense. Werefkin encountered the symbolist and modernist movement of the Russian avant-garde in Moscow in the 1890s.3 This new movement clashed with the realism of her mentor Repin, which by then was no longer revolutionary, and was now one of the doctrines that was being taught. This encounter plunged Werefkin into an artistic crisis, which also smoothed the way for her to leave for Munich in 1896 and turn to French post-impressionist and symbolist art.
This was the time of symbolists like Block, Belyj, Bryusov, Ivanov, Bal’mont, the music of Skriabin and Stravinsky, the modernist artists of Abramtsevo, the symbolists of the Blue Rose and the cosmopolitan movement Mir Iskusstva. These artists and movements no longer adhered to pure reason, but gravitated towards the intuitive, mystical, romantic role of the visionary artist who receives inspiration from above and is unique in their ability to transcend the outward appearance of the world. Russian artists were receptive to new western symbolist and modernist styles, without losing sight of their national tradition. It is in this changing context that we must view Marianne von Werefkin’s decision to reject the art of Repin.
Between 1891 and 1892 Werefkin became interested in highly academic texts about the deepest workings of the subconscious. This indicates the depths of her desire to explore the invisible world of the unconscious will in order to lay a scientific basis for a new artistic language. Werefkin challenged science on her own turf, stating that ‘art is as natural to man as thought, it is a normal function of the brain. Art is observation and consciousness. It is not an instinct, vague, indecisive, sickly. Art is the spark created from the friction between the individual and life. Two electric wires give off a spark, and that spark is also the property of the two wires that cause it. But… the spark is much more than that, and the same is true of art. The ‘shock’ brings forth something; it encompasses life and laws.’4
Der Sturm The Storm ca. 1907
Tempera on paper on cardboard
57 x 76 cm
Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona, FMW 0010
Werefkin believed ambition was a privilege afforded only to men, to the extent that, when she met Alexej von Jawlensky in 1892 and recognised his talent, she declared herself a source of inspiration for his art and, shortly after their arrival in Munich in 1896, ceased painting for almost ten years. She had an outspoken view of her position as a woman in a society dominated by men, as she was convinced that only men could unleash a new artistic revolution. Jawlensky and Werefkin remained together for 29 years, eventually separating in Ascona in 1921. The separation was difficult, as they were not the only two people in their relationship. The youthful Helene Nesnakomoff, their maid, and Jawlensky’s lover and model, lived with them; in 1902 she gave birth to Jawlensky’s son Andreas, and they married in 1922.
In Munich, Werefkin soon transformed the ‘pink salon’ in their home into a meeting place for artists, painters and avant-garde dancers, mainly Russian, where she, the ‘baroness’, became the undisputed intellectual and emotional hub of what she called the Brotherhood of Saint Luke.5 They debated symbolist culture and esotericism, shared an interest in the emerging field of psychoanalysis and in theosophy, and venerated the ‘art of emotion’, free of imitation and imbued with the gift of prediction and spirituality.
Werefkin further explored her ideas, encounters and experiences during trips she made for the purposes of study. She travelled to Venice in 1897, Normandy and Paris in 1903, Brittany and Paris in 1905, in the footsteps of Gauguin and Les Nabis, then Paris and Provence, the legendary landscape of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Matisse, and finally Geneva, where she visited her friend Ferdinand Hodler. Meanwhile, from 1901 to 1905, her journal, later published as Lettres à un Inconnu, in which she wrote about avant-garde aesthetic theories, began to take shape. From her study of French art and the theory of Einfühlung (empathy) Werefkin discovered at an early stage the symbolic, autonomous value of colour, which expresses the inner life of the artist. These were the first signs of the abstract turn that Kandinsky set in motion several years later, with his famous essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910-1912).
After this long period of reflection, experience and travel, Werefkin announced: ‘I spent a year in France, started anew again and a few months later I found the path I am now following.’6
Her profound exploration of theory in Lettres à un Inconnu is reflected in both the paintings and the countless sketches from 1906-1907 (the Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Ascona has no fewer than 170), and in the manifesto of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (‘New Artists’ Association Munich’) Werefkin played a key role in this group, established during two summers spent in Murnau (1908-1909) with Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. She contributed to the advent of what critics would later dub lyrical expressionism, as distinct from the more social expressionism of Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Münter.
Werefkin’s ‘inner’ landscapes acquired a geometric and stylised connotation in this period, each scene acquiring an abstract temporal/spatial dimension, and often a prophetic character, with great dramatic impact. This gave rise to the intense colours that seem to shout from the canvas, stylised lines, some
harmonious, others broken, rhythmic or twisting, and to flat, enchanting, dynamic shapes that distort reality. Her skilfully composed ‘inner’ landscapes express pain, fear and hope, all internally processed in symbolic form.
When Werefkin began painting again, she experimented with a great variety of media – tempera, gouache, pastel, coloured pencil, charcoal, chalk India ink, pen and pencil – mixing them, using pure colours, which automatically acquired a strong constructive quality. She moved shapes as if guided by hidden forces, in harmonious rhythmic succession, dissonant, beyond time and space. This tension can be seen in The Storm, that transcends time and space. The synthetic reduction to the surface gives it a vibrancy, while the loose brushwork and the shapes of the stylised female figures introduce a certain naivety. The skilful choice of the contrasting colours blue-black and red-black give the image a suggestive quality, as we forget time and are profoundly moved, like the aching hands that desperately clutch at the last ray of hope that shines in the distance by the beam of a lighthouse, as a portent of doom. In Homecoming. we see, thanks to a cleverly reversed perspective whereby the background is reflected in a twodimensional foreground, a row of women in black dresses walking in silence, each of them weighed down by an existential burden that erases all individual personality traits, in a meagre light, the light of ‘truth’, which seems to evoke a cry for justice.
Werefkin’s earliest sketches in graphite and coloured pencil already showed the influence of the mysticism and theosophy of the time. She refers to the art of French impressionist and neo-impressionist fellow artists, transforming their cityscapes and café and theatre scenes into events removed from time and space, where creatures and objects seem trapped, alienated from one another, without the ability to communicate.
Werefkin identified closely with painter Edvard Munch (Ådalsbruk, NO, 18631944, Oslo, NO) . Her work resembled his in terms of the use of symbolic colours, of the lively, flowing brushwork, and the same structural approach and iconographic references, as in The Woman with the Lantern. In this painting, which depicts a snowy mountain landscape near Trakai in Lithuania, underlying forces cause everything to quiver, and the silhouette of a woman in the right foreground appears to extend like a hard existential truth into the expanse of a hill with no sky. This is not so much a personal drama as an embodiment of a cosmic sense of pain emanating from the hopeless fate of this pig farmer, where everything is absorbed by the walled garden (hortus conclusus) that encloses her. This pain, as in Munch’s The Scream (1893), is a cry from nature, like a rushing stream with which the artist identifies and which reflects the pain of a life without meaning, and thus becomes something universal and symbolic. This is a pessimistic view of life, characteristic of Werefkin’s Russian symbolist roots.
Tempera on paper on cardboard
56 x 73 cm
Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona, FMW 007