Rosa Pfäffinger

Rosa Pfäffinger, around 1890

Rosa Pfäffinger (* 1866 ; † 1949 ) from Trieste was an Austrian painter , patron and bohemian at the end of the 19th century .

Life

Ladies Academy: Rosa Pfäffinger (lying in front), Maria Slavona (front right), in between Käthe Schmidt, married. Kollwitz (seated)
1889
photography
from private ownership, Munich Link to the picture (please note copyrights )

Rosa Pfäffinger grew up in a very wealthy and cultivated family. She was the daughter of the merchant Georg Pfäffinger, who was Austrian consul in Damascus and Trieste from 1845 to 1861 , and his wife Adele, née Stoeger. After the death of her sister in 1888, along with her inheritance, her share of the property of her father, who died in 1872, was also paid out.

In 1888 Rosa Pfäffinger, Maria Slavona and Marie von Geyso, known as Mimi, met as students at the private painting school of the portrait and genre painter Alois Erdtelt (1851–1911) in Munich. After the Erdteltschen painting school closed in 1889, the women switched to the Munich women's academy and attended the painting class of Ludwig von Herterich , who only accepted highly talented and professional students, including Käthe Schmidt, known under the name Käthe Kollwitz .

Unsatisfied with the training opportunities for women artists in Germany, Maria Slavona first went to Paris in 1890 and then Rosa Pfäffinger , where they studied the Impressionists and became self-taught. In 1891/1892 Pfäffinger and Slavona moved in with the Slovenian impressionist Ivana Kobilca (1861–1926) and the Danish sculptor Hans Brich Dahlerup (1871–1892), grandson of Hans Birch Dahlerup , and with the German-Danish painter Willy Gretor (also Grétor; actually Julius Rudolph Wilhelm Petersen; 1868–1923), a shared six-room apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes in the 8th arrondissement in Paris . It was an experiment with new ways of life, in which they attempted in free love to “break the survived, rigid, but affective, subjectivist house, family and marriage system.” Despite their initial intention, only closed for several months in Paris studying, they stayed in France for more than a decade.

Maria Slavona became Gretor's lover at the same time as Ivana Kobilca and gave birth to his illegitimate daughter Lilly in 1891 . Following Maria Slavona, Rosa Pfäffinger became the lover of Willy Gretor, his wife in 1891 and the mother of their son Georg (1892–1943).

Gretor is described as a brilliant adventurer and impostor, painter, poet, picture forger and art dealer. And it was Rosa Pfäffinger who paid all the bills for bohemian life in the pompous apartment with valet, nanny and cook, plus the rented studios in the neighborhood. Gretor himself had his own accommodation, came and went when he wanted, and Pfäffinger also financed this apartment, his rich lifestyle and his mistresses. These were first the Italian singer Severina and after her the dancer Polaire.

Life in the shared apartment lasted until Rosa Pfäffinger ran out of money from her inheritance. The two friends Pfäffinger and Slavona stayed behind as single mothers who split up childcare and work in the studio and moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon . The new way of life offered the only opportunity to continue working as professionally active artists. With financial restrictions and severe psychological stress, both women were able to counter social repression in art , which was less effective in France than in Germany.

After the dissolution of the shared apartment around 1892, Albert Langen took over the apartment, including its inventory and art objects, and founded his publishing, book and art shop in Paris in 1893 . With Pfäffinger's money, Gretor had bought art and supported many artists, including August Strindberg in 1894 , who had moved into Rosa Pfäffiger's studio in Passy .

Debauchery and extravagance, but also jealousy and humiliation, determined Pfäffinger's life in Paris. The once wealthy, now impoverished Rosa Pfäffinger now lived alternately in Paris and Berlin, where her son Georg Gretor was taken in by Käthe Kollwitz as a foster child from 1904 and raised together with their sons Hans and Peter Kollwitz until he came of age . Later he used the pseudonym Georges Barbizon as a journalist after his birthplace , was married to Esther Gretor , née Kaae, and moved to Denmark. Maria Slavona met the Swiss art dealer Otto Ackermann in Paris, escaped disappointments and financial difficulties, and finally achieved recognition and confirmation. Since 1901 Slavona had exhibited as a corresponding member in the Berlin Secession and in 1904 participated in the first joint exhibition with the Munich Secession. Now it was Slavona who supported the impoverished Rosa Pfäffinger.

literature

• Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen: The Paris Bohème (1889–1895): an autobiographical report by the painter. Verlag Ludwig, Kiel 2007, ISBN 978-3-937719-39-9 .
• Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen: The hereditary enemy or an anti-doll house - snapshots from Nora's time. An autobiographical report by the painter Rosa Pfäffinger. In: Theresa Georgen; Carola Muysers (Ed.): Stages of the self. 2006
• Yury Winterberg, Sonya Winterberg: Kollwitz: The Biography. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-570102-02-2 .
• Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen: Willy Gretor (1868-1923). Ludwig, 2005, ISBN 978-3-937719-33-7 .

Web links

• Edwin Scharff Museum is dedicated to German women artists. In: Südwest Presse , accessed on February 3, 2016

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marie (Mimi) Freiin von Geyso from Munich, († 1941), painter and writer initially under the pseudonym Guy de Soom , studied among others with Rose Plehn in the painting class of Ludwig von Herderich.
2. ^ Writer's lexicon : Marie von Geyso (born April 3, 1862 in Meiningen; † July 26, 1926 in Danzig), pseudonym Guy von Soom, painter, narrator; Daughter of a chamberlain; Studied painting in Munich; Friendship with Ricarda Huch; from 1892 in Danzig. , from thueringer-literaturrat.de, accessed on April 25, 2016.
3. ↑ Rosa Pfäffinger (back left) and Ivan Kobilca (front left) while studying with Alois Erdtelt in Munich around 1888, (Slovenian)
4. ↑ Photo: Archives of the National Gallery
5. ↑ Rosa Pfäffinger: The hereditary enemy. Typewritten manuscript, pp. 65f.
6. ↑ Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen: Out into the world - the departure of German and Finnish artists to Paris before the turn of the century. Retrieved February 3, 2016 (PDF file)
7. ↑ Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen: Willy Gretor (1868–1923): his role in the international art business and art trade around 1900. ( Bau + Kunst , 11; Schleswig-Holsteinische Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte , 11). Ludwig, Kiel, 2006, ISBN 3-937719-33-4 .