The black women
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| The black women |
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| Marianne von Werefkin , 1910 |
| Gouache on cardboard |
| 72.5 x 111.5 cm |
| Sprengel Museum , Hanover |
The black women is the title of an expressionist painting that was probably made by Marianne von Werefkin in 1910 during her stay in Murnau am Staffelsee and Sindelsdorf . Today it is owned by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover .
Description and interpretation
The picture is made using the painting technique gouache on cardboard and has the dimensions 72.5 × 11.5 cm. Today it belongs to the collection of the Sprengel Museum Hannover.
In the painting The Black Women , Werefkin sketches several women in black or dark blue clothing, carrying white bundles or sacks on their backs. They seem to be on their way back to their village in the mountains after a busy day. The scene shown shows a row of houses and high mountains in the background. Presumably the women have washed laundry in the purple brook and are now packing them up to carry them home before nightfall. It is not the only picture of Werefkin that shows women with a load on their backs. The picture Heimkehr / Il ritorno (52 × 80.5 cm, tempera on cardboard, Fondazione Marianne Werefkin , Ascona, inventory number: FMW 0-0-12) dates from 1909 and shows a similar motif but a completely different color scheme having.
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Werefkin's paintings Black Women and a similar one entitled Autumn (School) , around 1907/10, share compositional and color elements. In both pictures, people, girls and adult working women in black clothes walk in a kind of procession towards a threatening blue mountain backdrop with red or orange light in the sky, which is the only luminous surface in the pictures. The walk of the people can be understood as a way of life. In the autumn picture the green of the meadows indicates the growth of the children and their life ahead of them, in the other picture the dark blue of the falling night could indicate the end of life. The orange or red are therefore to be understood as a redemption motive. In the autumn picture there is calm and confidence, the group of girls with their teacher moves on a path from the left edge of the picture in the direction of a mountain village on a lake shore with a church tower. In contrast, the image of black women exudes doubt and unrest. Five of the old women walk from right to left past a backdrop of houses, which has nothing domestic about it, windows and entrances are not lit, but reddish flowers are indicated on some windows. Two of them are still crouching together in the foreground. One walks apart from the main group on the other bank of the watercourse. She tucked her bundle under her right arm and thus assumed a posture that was curved to the left. This image has a distinct perspective with a vanishing point that is centered on the left edge of the image. The women's corridor leads down into a dark gorge. Above this stands the sunset in the sky, which can definitely be viewed as alpine glow . In this picture the painter uses black outlines. The movement of the figures and the resulting visual impression of “not being at home” are given a traumatic element in this picture. For Marianne von Werefkin, the motif of movement, of the walk, always has a double meaning. On the one hand, it is the walk to somewhere to be understood as transitoriness, as not being at home and as a transition, but on the other hand it is also the change in people in a positive direction.
Importance of color
Marianne von Werefkin has long been concerned with the meaning of color. She referred to the findings of Paul Gauguin and the artist group Nabis and the Fauves , after the color is not to be equated with the lighting of pictorial objects and thus the lack of all shadows and the dissolution of space. In the picture she only uses blue and red as primary colors, so when looking at it she deliberately creates "dissonances" and a "color shock". In her painting style, Werefkin was also influenced by the cloisonism art movement , which she got to know during a visit to the artist in Pont-Aven , France , especially with regard to the contouring of her drawing. In contrast to the conception of art at the time, she provocatively uses the non-colors black and white on an equal footing with the others. In accordance with the school of Pont-Aven, she chooses black for the contours of the black women , but in contrast white for the autumn picture, which contradicts the strict rules of cloisonism. With this technique, she neatly delimits color areas from one another without blurring the transitions. Marianne von Werefkin took, unusual for the time, all artistic freedom. From a compositional point of view, the line, and above all the diagonal, has an outstanding meaning in her works. In addition, however, there are the vertical lines of the thin tree trunks in the autumn picture. This corresponds to their view of the interplay of color and drawing. While the artist used to paint with oil paints , from 1906 she only used mixed techniques that consist of watercolor and gouache paints, pencil, pastel and chalk and are combined in different ways. She speaks of an honesty in painting and color and increasingly used a painting technique with tempera paints . Two years later, in 1912, her painter colleague Wassily Kandinsky adopted her thoughts and statements in his work On the Spiritual in Art: especially in painting , without mentioning Werefkin. He writes about the use of non-harmonizing basic colors, such as certain shades of blue and red, as they appear in Werefkin's picture: “In a medium condition, like vermilion, the red gains in the persistence of the sharp feeling: It is like a uniformly glowing passion, [...] which can be extinguished by blue like glowing iron by water. This red does not tolerate anything cold and loses its sound and meaning through the same. Or to put it better: This violent, tragic cooling creates a tone that painters avoid and frowned upon as dirt, especially today. And wrongly. "
reception
Marianne von Werefkin's pictures often depict rows of people, mostly women, but also workers, who walk down a street or a path in a processional manner in black clothing and with their heads covered. For the art critic Heinz Ohff, these rankings made the virtuosity of her pictures. In the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel of November 12, 1989 he wrote on the occasion of an exhibition of Werefkin's works: “People, [...], houses, one like the other [...] do not become like individuals, rather as something that recurs over and over again treated and presented. The Werefkin fits into our mass age almost better than most of the Expressionist forerunners [...]. From her teacher Ilja Repin she takes over the tendency to bitter social criticism. "
The image of Black Women was the subject of a so-called art service on June 9, 2014 in the Sprengelmuseum, Hanover at Whitsun. The sermon was delivered by the city superintendent of Hanover, Hans-Martin Heinemann .
Web links
- Adrienne Kochman: Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909. 19thc-artworldwide.org, accessed March 2, 2017 (British English).
Individual evidence
- ^ Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938): early 20th century visionary woman artist. In: wordpress.com. October 24, 2015, accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. In: women's garden. Pioneers of modernity in Germany 1900–1914. (Exhibition catalog Hannover / Wuppertal, Sprengel Museum / Von der Heydt-Museum, 1997), Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-87584-994-9 , p. 254.
- ↑ Nicole Brögmann: I only live with the eye. In: Marianne von Werefkin. Œuvres peintes 1907–1936. Fondation Neumann, Gingins, en coopération avec le Museo Communale d'Arte Moderna, Ascona 1996, ISBN 2-940126-02-X , p. 38 ff.
- ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin . In: women's garden. Pioneers of modernity in Germany 1900–1914. (Exhibition catalog Hannover / Wuppertal, Sprengel Museum / Von der Heydt-Museum, 1997), Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-87584-994-9 , SS 248–260.
- ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. Hirmer, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7774-9040-7 , p. 66 f.
- ↑ Hanni Geiger: The position of women in the ›Blauer Reiter‹: Marianne von Werefkin. ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) In: Art History. Open Peer Reviewed Journal.
- ↑ Wassily Kandinsky: About the spiritual in art: especially in painting , Munich 1912, p. 83
- ↑ Text of the sermon with an image description and interpretation ( memento of the original from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF).
