Milly Steger

Milly Steger (born June 15, 1881 in Rheinberg as Emilie Sibilla Elisabeth Johanna Steger ; † October 31, 1948 in Berlin ) was a German sculptor .

Live and act

Theater Hagen with statues of women by Milly Steger

Rising youth by Milly Steger, 1920. Holdings of the Städelmuseum Frankfurt am Main

Milly Steger spent her childhood in Elberfeld , where her father was appointed magistrate. After finishing school, she received language and decency lessons in a boarding school in London , while she also took drawing lessons from a London painter and decided to become an artist. In Elberfeld she then attended a class for plasterers and stonemasons at the local arts and crafts school.

In the period from 1903 to 1906 she received training in Karl Janssen's private studio in Düsseldorf . As a woman, she was not allowed to study with Janssen at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . During a study visit to Florence she met Georg Kolbe, whose work impressed her so much that she later referred to herself as his student without actually having been. In 1908 she moved to Berlin and taught at the women's academy of the Association of Berlin Women Artists . While traveling in Paris, she admired works by Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol . In 1909 she visited the Belgian sculptor George Minne .

When the art patron Karl Ernst Osthaus invited her to Hagen in 1910, she moved to the Westphalian industrial city on the Ruhr and was the first large-format architectural sculpture to create four larger-than-life statues of women on the facade of the Hagen Theater , which caused a scandal. Milly Steger but at the same time made known in Germany. She was involved in the circle of artists around Osthaus and made contacts with the sculptors Moissey Kogan and Will Lammert , the painter Christian Rohlfs and the glass painter Jan Thorn-Prikker . Steger lived in a house in the artists' colony "Am Stirnband" in Hohenhagen, which she decorated with a caryatid.

Caryatid on Milly Steger's house in Hagen, dating from 1912–1917

For the tenth anniversary of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen in 1912, Milly Steger donated a sandstone woman's head above the museum portal; in the following three years she designed reliefs for the Hagen town hall. With the support of Osthaus, she took part in exhibitions of the Sonderbund (1910 in Düsseldorf and 1912 in Cologne) and in the German Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914.

Her financial situation worsened so much during the First World War that she could no longer regularly raise the rent for her studio in Hagen. In 1917 she returned to Berlin, where she stayed until the end of her life. Else Lasker-Schüler sang in an expressionist poem in 1916 as “a buffalo with throwing power”.

Steger signed the program of the work council for art; In 1919 her answers to a questionnaire campaign were published in which she argued primarily for the admission of women to academies. As a full member of the German Association of Artists , Milly Steger also took part in its annual exhibitions - e.g. For example, at the anniversary exhibition (25 years DKB) in the Cologne State House at Rheinpark in 1929, where she exhibited the limestone sculpture Retrospect , up to the last pre-war exhibition in 1936 at the Hamburger Kunstverein , which was forcibly closed after ten days by the Reich Chamber of Art . From 1927 to 1942 she taught sculpture and life drawing at the teaching establishment of the Association of Women Artists in Berlin, of which she was a member. From 1932 she worked in Georg Kolbe's former studio , which was destroyed in November 1943. As a result, the artist lost a large part of her work. In 1937 three sculptures, three drawings and four prints by Milly Steger were confiscated as "degenerate". In the same year, the sculpture Sinnende was exhibited in the Great German Art Exhibition . Her work was not represented in the various “ Degenerate Art ” exhibitions . A sculpture that was rediscovered severely damaged in the Berlin sculpture find in 2010 and initially attributed to Milly Steger was identified as Fritz Masko's Somnambule .

After the Second World War , Milly Steger worked again in a new Berlin studio. Milly Steger's work was represented in the General German Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1946 , which was set up as reparation for the victims of National Socialist art policy.

In 1948 she was accepted into the Honorary Presidium of the Democratic Women's Federation of Germany .

literature

• Steger, Milly . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 31 : Siemering – Stephens . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1937, p. 538 .
• Steger, Milly . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 4 : Q-U . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1958, p. 351 .
• Dirck von Alphen In: Christian Tümpel: German sculptors (1900–1945). Degenerate? Zwolle 1992, p. 242 f.
• Birgit Schulte: The sculptor Milly Steger. Remove the boundaries of being a woman. New Folkwang Verlag, Hagen 1998.
• Gora Jain: The anthropologically founded work idea in the oeuvre of the sculptor Milly Steger (1881–1948). Herbolzheim 2002.
• Kai Artinger: Milly Steger. In: Britta Jürgs (ed.): Like a Nile bride thrown into the waves. Portraits of expressionist artists and writers. AvivA Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932338-04-9 , pp. 250-267.
• Christina Threuter: The coveted bodies of the sculptor Milly Steger. In: Gender perspectives interdisciplinary - transversal - current. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 79–99.

Web links

Commons : Milly Steger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Milly Steger in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Source place of birth / name: Stadtarchiv Rheinberg.
2. ↑ Else Lasker-Schüler: Milly Steger in: The collected poems . White Books Publishing House, Leipzig 1917.
3. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Full members of the Deutscher Künstlerbund since it was founded in 1903 / Steger, Milly ( Memento of the original from February 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on January 4, 2016) 
4. ^ Steger, Milly, Berlin in the exhibition catalog of the Deutscher Künstlerbund Cologne 1929. May – September 1929 in the State House. M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1929, p. 32 cat. No. 293 Retrospectors. Limestone.
5. ↑ Milly Steger in the list of the members exhibiting in 1936, in: 34th Annual Exhibition in Bonn. Images banned in 1936. Deutscher Künstlerbund eV, Berlin 1986, p. 99.
6. ^ "Degenerate Art" confiscated inventory. Retrieved November 27, 2019 . 
7. ^ Sinnende - Great German Art Exhibition 1937. gdk-research.de, accessed on November 9, 2016 . 
8. ↑ Confiscated inventory of degenerate art. Accessed January 30, 2020 .