Nell Walden

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Nell Walden (1918)

Nell Walden (born Roslund; born December 29, 1887 in Karlskrona , Sweden ; † October 21, 1975 in Bern , Switzerland ) was a Swedish-Swiss painter , musician, writer and art collector . From 1912 to 1924 she was the second wife of the publisher and gallery owner Herwarth Walden and worked on his Berlin storm projects . In 1919 he donated his avant-garde art collection to her . In 1933 she moved to Switzerland.

Live and act

Education and marriage

Nell Walden and Herwarth Walden (1915)

Nell (Nelly) Anna Charlotta Roslund was the daughter of Pastor Frithiof Roslund. In 1903 she moved to Landskrona with her family . After graduating from high school in Trelleborg and a stay in Lübeck , she studied music and graduated in Lund in 1908 with a diploma as an organist. Then she went to Berlin to perfect her German language skills. In 1911 she met Herwarth Walden , whom she married in November 1912 in London . Walden had divorced his first wife Else Lasker-Schüler that same year . His real name was Georg Lewin and Lasker-Schüler owed his pseudonym “Herwarth Walden”, inspired by Henry Thoreau's novel Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). In 1910 he founded the art magazine Der Sturm and in 1912 opened the Sturm Gallery with a traveling exhibition by the Blue Rider .

Sturm projects and beginning of artistic activity

Herwarth and Nell Walden in their Berlin apartment (1916)

In 1913 the couple traveled through Europe to select works of art for Herwarth Walden's exhibition First German Autumn Salon , which opened on September 20, 1913 in Berlin. At the time, it offered the largest selection of international avant-garde art and helped many painters and sculptors achieve their breakthrough, but also provoked a cultural scandal. More than 350 works by around 80 active artists as well as commemorative works by Henri Rousseau were on display . The painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky encouraged Nell Walden to paint. After the outbreak of war in 1914, she worked as a journalist and translator. Her Scandinavian language skills formed the basis for the "news office Der Sturm", which worked for various German intelligence services in the Nordic countries and in the Netherlands and formed the financial basis for the storm company during the war. Herwarth Walden did not have to do military service because of his eye condition ( astigmatism ). She started collecting works by Sturm artists, Swedish folk art, and art from Africa and Oceania. In 1915 she painted her first reverse glass pictures. A year later she took painting lessons at the newly founded Sturm Art School, where, for example, Rudolf Bauer , Rudolf Blümner , Heinrich Campendonk , Georg Muche , Lothar Schreyer , Arnold Topp and Herwarth Walden taught. Nell Walden exhibited for the first time in 1917: together with Arnold Topp, she showed her abstract pictures in the 51st Sturm exhibition . In 1919 Walden transferred the Walden art collection, which they had built up together, to his wife. In 1923 she resigned from working for the Sturm and divorced Herwarth Walden the following year because she did not agree with his turn to communism.

Further marriages and moving to Switzerland

In 1926 Nell Walden married the Jewish doctor Hans Hermann Heimann in Berlin. In 1932 she published the essay Essay and Meaning of Astrology and Horoscopy in the Almanach Omnibus of the Berlin gallery by Alfred Flechtheim . In 1933, due to the political situation, she formally divorced Heimann and moved to Ascona , Switzerland , in order to be able to live with Heimann there. However, Heimann was arrested, deported and murdered by the National Socialists . She gave her collections to Swiss art museums for safekeeping. She later parted with her collection largely through sale or donations.

Franz Marc: Two Sheep (1912) from the Nell Walden Collection , now Saarland Museum , Saarbrücken

In 1940 she married the Swiss teacher Hannes Urech. In 1944 the couple settled in Schinznach-Bad . At the end of 1954, a large part of the Nell Walden collection was auctioned at the Stuttgart Art Cabinet , including works by numerous expressionists such as Franz Marcs ; and Oskar Kokoschka's portrait of Herwarth Walden came under the hammer. The collection also included 14 paintings by Marc Chagall and a painting by Wassily Kandinsky, which were auctioned against the will of the artist's heirs.

In 1962 the couple moved to the newly built Seehalde house in Brestenberg near Seengen . Hannes Urech died a year later and Nell Urech-Walden moved to Bern. After her death in 1975 in Bern, she was buried next to her husband in Aarau .

Nell Walden's abstract work is represented, for example, in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Landskrona Museum and the Kunstmuseum Bern and is occasionally offered in art dealers.

Portraits and a satire

John Jon-And: Herwarth and Nell Walden , Indian ink (before 1924)

The sculptor William Wauer created cubist busts of Herwarth and Nell Walden in 1917 and 1918 , and Hugó Schreiber portrayed them in dance poses. Oskar Kokoschka portrayed Herwarth Walden in 1910 and Nell in 1916. The ink drawing by the Swedish painter John Jon-And (1889–1941) is undated.

Herwarth and Nell Walden are portrayed under the names Ossi and Hermione Ganswind in Hermann Essig's 1919 posthumously published satirical key novel Der Taifun , which deals with the Sturm group; Hermione is referred to as the "head" of the typhoon .

Awards

  • 1967: Swedish Order of Knights 1st Class of the Wasa Order
  • 1968: Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany.
  • 1970: Silver medal of the Accademia Internazionala "Tommaso Campanella"

Exhibitions (selection)

  • List of exhibitions in the Sturm Gallery 1912–1930, including Nell Walden (Dutch)
  • 1927: Nell Walden-Heimann and her collections , Galerie Flechtheim , Berlin
  • 1944: The storm. Collection Nell Walden from the years 1912–1920 as well as her collection Art of Indigenous People , Kunstmuseum Bern
  • 1954: The storm. Samling Nell Walden. Expressionister, Futurister, Kubister in Stockholm and in seven other cities in Sweden
  • 1957: Nell Walden collection and pictures by the painter, special exhibition, Aarau Industrial Museum
  • 1958: Exhibition of his own pictures at Klipstein and Kornfeld in Bern
  • 1961: The storm. Herwarth Walden and the European avant-garde. Berlin 1912–1932 , orangery of the Charlottenburg Palace , Berlin
  • 1966: Nell Walden. Collection and own works , Kunstmuseum Bern
  • 1972: Exhibition of his own pictures in the Art Museum Landskrona
  • 2010: The Storm (1910–1932). Expressionist graphics and poetry , Olten Art Museum
  • 2012: The storm - center of the avant-garde , Von der Heydt-Museum , Wuppertal
  • 2015/2016: Sturm-Frauen - female artists of the avant-garde in Berlin 1910-1932 . Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Fonts

Title page to Herwarth Walden. A picture of life
  • Nell Walden-Heimann: Under the stars. Poems . Stössinger, Berlin, 1933.
  • Nell Walden and Lothar Schreyer (eds.): The storm. A memory book for Herwarth Walden and the artists from the Sturmkreis . Klein, Baden-Baden 1954.
  • Nell Walden: Herwarth Walden. A picture of life . Kupferberg, Berlin-Mainz 1963.

Secondary literature

  • Hans Christoph von Tavel and Roswitha Beyer: Nell Walden. Collection and own works. Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern 1966
  • August Stramm : Letters to Nell and Herwarth Walden, ed. by Michael Trabitzsch. Edition Sirene, Berlin 1988
  • Hermann Essig : The typhoon. Novel . Reprint of the first edition from 1919, edited and with an afterword by Rolf-Bernhard Essig. Weidle, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-931135-28-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Quoted from the web link of the Kunstmuseum Olten.
  2. ↑ Hubert van den Berg: Sometimes too much, sometimes too little monument , literaturkritik.de, accessed on July 4, 2013.
  3. ↑ Herwarth Walden biography (PDF; 4.6 MB), kunstmuseumolten.ch, accessed on July 3, 2013.
  4. ↑ Nell Walden , shop.samovar.ch, accessed on July 9, 2013.
  5. ↑ Gesa Jeuthe: Art Changing values. The price development of German modernism in the national and international art market 1925 to 1955. Akademie, Berlin 1911, ISBN 978-3-05-005079-9 , p. 172.
  6. ↑ A donor is doing his best , zeit.de, November 18, 1954, accessed on July 2, 2013.
  7. ↑ Pictures for a Butterbrot , spiegel.de, 28/1954, accessed on July 12, 2013.
  8. ↑ Nell Walden , artvalue.com, accessed on July 8, 2013.
  9. ↑ Nell Walden Dancing ( Memento from May 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Oskar Kokoschka, Nell Walden, 1916 , lokalkompass.de, accessed on July 8, 2013.
  11. ↑ Der Taifun , weidle-verlag.de, accessed on July 14, 2013.
  12. ↑ The Storm (1910–1932). Expressionist graphics and poetry (PDF; 336 kB)
  13. ↑ Hubert van den Berg: Sometimes too much, sometimes too little monument , literaturkritik.de, accessed on July 9, 2013.
  14. ↑ Ingrid Pfeiffer, Max Hollein (ed.): Sturm-Frauen: Artists of the Avant-garde in Berlin 1910-1932 . Wienand, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-86832-277-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Walden, Nell
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roslund, Nell Anna Charlotta (maiden name); Walden-Heimann, Nell; Urech-Walden, Nell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish-Swiss painter, writer and art collector
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlskrona , Sweden
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1975
Place of death Bern , Switzerland