100 years ago, women were finally allowed to study at art academies. Yet today, they still are eclipsed by their male colleagues. The book "I Love Women in Arts" plans to change that.
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Male artists have long condescended to women in the arts. "Where there's wool, there's also a woman who will spin it, even if it is just to pass the time," wrote German painter Oskar Schlemmer of female artistry. He was a key member of the Bauhaus school in the 1920s, an organization dominated by men and that was often disparaging of women.
A century later, star German painterGeorg Baselitz claimed in 2013 that "it's a fact" that "women don't paint very well," meaning they fetched lower prices for their work that failed to pass the "value test."
In an interview with The Guardian in 2015, he also said that women artists did not succeed to the same extent as men because they lacked ambition — though he failed to mention the structural inequalities that women continue to face, including a huge gender pay gap.
Is among the top 100 in the international art scene: Hito SteyerlImage: Hito Steyerl, Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
100 women artists — and curators
Despite the reality that 60% of all graduates from German art academies are women, the fact that such prejudices have persisted for so long indicates entrenched gender inequality in the German arts.
In response, artists Bianca Kennedy and Janine Mackenroth have published I Love Women in Arts on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the first admission of women to art academies. The artists asked 100 female curators, art historians, museum directors and art critics to present a German female artist of their choice.
Käthe Kollwitz on her 70th birthday: July 8, 1937Image: Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
In the late 19th century, it was still a real challenge for women like sculptor Käthe Kollwitz to train as a professional artist, though her father encouraged her talent and sent her to a private painting school in Königsberg.
Often, however, such private institutions did not provide adequate instruction. But when the Weimar Constitution of 1919 granted equal rights to men and women, including the right to vote, new opportunities arose for women, including admittance to state art schools.
Who were the women at the Bauhaus art school?
The avant-garde of design met in Weimar in 1919, including many women. Their careers were quite different from those of their male colleagues, however — unrecognized and long forgotten.
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Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein
Her name stands for avant-garde ceramics and entrepreneurial talent. After just a few months at the Bauhaus school — the men made sure she could not continue — the talented young woman founded the Haël ceramic workshops in Brandenburg. Her plates, pots, cups and saucers became known around the world.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Gunta Stölzl
Between 1919 and 1933, 780 men and 500 women studied at the Bauhaus. One of the women was Gunta Stölzl, a master weaver and later head of the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1925 to 1926. She designed great carpets and woven materials.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Anni Albers
The coveted painting, architecture and sculpture classes were reserved exclusively for men. Female applicants were placed in a "women's class" created just for them that led straight to the weaving workshop from 1921 onwards. When Anni Albers began her studies in Weimar in 1922, she automatically moved on to Gunta Stölzl's weaving class after her introductory course with Johannes Itten.
Image: Kunstsammlung NRW/Helen M. Post
Marianne Brandt
Marianne Brandt ended up studying metalworking in what was essentially a male-only domain — and she was more successful than many of her fellow students. Her ideas greatly influenced the development of design in the 20th century. Her tea and coffee sets were famous and her spectacular lamp designs are iconic classics.
Image: Tecnolumen
Gertrud Grunow
In the early 20th century, Gertrud Grunow developed her own style of teaching music. At the Bauhaus school, she taught students and masters alike the equal, harmonious use of all the senses.
Image: Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag GmbH
Lilly Reich
Lilly Reich worked alongside Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe. In January 1932, he appointed her head of the construction/development department and weaving mill at Bauhaus Dessau and later at Bauhaus Berlin, where she worked until December 1932. She designed chairs and was involved in the construction of the famous Barcelona Pavilion for the World Exhibition.
Image: picture-alliance/Arcaid/D. Clapp
Lucia Moholy
The second largest workshop that hosted women at the Bauhaus school was photography. After her husband Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was invited to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, Lucia Moholy began an apprenticeship in a photo studio and photographed workshop works at the school. A series of pictures of the new Bauhaus building and the Master Houses in Dessau are among her most important works.
Image: Imago/Artokoloro
Alma Buscher
In 1922, this designer joined the Bauhaus school where she developed toys that allow kids to be creative. The "Little Ship-building game" with its colorful wooden pieces is still produced and sold today.
Image: Naef Spiele AG/Heiko Hillig
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In 1919, the renowned Bauhaus in Weimar also opened its doors to female applicants, and from 1920, admission to most German art academies was then possible for women. Käthe Kollwitz was the first woman to be admitted to the Prussian Academy of Arts.
Yet in the century since, inequalities have persisted, including in art books themselves, with Kennedy and Mackenroth wanting to redress the lack of visibility for women artists in art publications.
A man's world
Selected by women working in the art and culture industry, I Love Women in Arts presents well-known, forgotten and yet to be discovered female artists, including two 15th century Dominican nuns who wove their likenesses into the border of a prayer rug.
"This is unusual not only for the age, but also for women of a religious order," says Mackenroth and Kennedy of a rug that is the oldest example of a work created by women in the book.
Another featured woman artist is painter Gabriele Münter, a member of the Expressionist Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) artists' group founded in 1912 in Munich, albeit one that is predominantly associated with male artists like Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky — with whom Münter had a relationship.
Gabriele Münter and her partner Wassili Kandinsky in Paris Image: picture-alliance/Heritage Images
Münter needed her father's permission to attend art school in Munich, which was common for other artists featured in the book such as Anni Albers, who was married to Bauhaus "crafts master" Josef Albers. When Albers attended the Bauhaus school, the textile artist was limited to a weaving class like almost all female art students in the Weimar Bauhaus at the time. All other courses were reserved for men.
Women who also devoted time to motherhood were frowned upon by the male-dominated art establishment. "Imagine men giving birth, art history would be a different story," said Mackenroth and Kennedy.
But even today, only 25% of new acquisitions in art museums are works by female artists, say the editors.
11 renowned female artists based in Germany
The art world is still male-dominated, but things are changing. Here are 11 important artists you need to know.
Image: Imago/I. Kjer
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Natascha Sadr Haghighian represented Germany at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Shown here wearing a stone mask at a press conference ahead of the art show, she went by the name of Natascha Süder Happelmann for the event. The artist, a two-time Documenta participant, often plays with the notion of identity. She created for instance a website allowing people to swap parts of each other's CVs.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/W. Kumm
Anne Imhof
Anne Imhof became the star of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her performance piece "Faust" in the German pavilion, which won her the Golden Lion award. The mammoth work dealt with the themes of power and powerlessness, arbitrary violence, resistance and freedom. She has been commissioned to recreate the piece at London's Tate Modern museum in March 2019.
Image: Imago/I. Kjer
Hito Steyerl
German-Japanese video artist Hito Steyerl represented Germany in 2015 at the Venice Biennale. She was the first woman to be ranked number one in ArtReview's "Power 100," the magazine's list of the most powerful people in the art world. Her influential work deals with surveillance, military confrontation and the entanglement of corporations.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/S. Pilick
Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel gained renown through numerous international exhibitions. Her work often integrates knitted fabrics or black electric hotplates dotting colored surfaces, a reference to stereotypical depictions of the housewife and an ironic homage to the dots used by different Pop Art artists.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Katharina Fritsch
Designed to carry statues of British historical figures, London's Trafalgar Square has a plinth at each of its four corners. Since 1999, the fourth plinth has been showcasing different works of art on a temporary basis. German sculptor Katharina Fritsch's giant blue cockerel, "Hahn / Cock," was on display there in 2013. The artist is renowned for her large-scale, monochromatic sculptures.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Isa Genzken
A 2013 retrospective of Isa Genzken's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York cemented the sculptor's international reputation. She had previously participated in different art shows including the Documenta and the Sculpture Projects Münster. Her early works deal with the ideals of modern architecture; since the 2000s, she has created apocalyptic installations made of cheap materials.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Kalaene
Katharina Grosse
Katharina Grosse quickly gained renown with her innovative work that opens up new dimensions in painting. The Berlin-based artist's air brushed installations often submerge viewers in a chaotic space of colors. Her works are part of the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kunsthaus in Zurich, among others.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Balk
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn is a pioneering female artist in Germany: She was the first woman to become a professor at the Berlin University of Arts in 1989, as well as the first to be awarded the prestigious Goslar Kaiser Ring Award in 1992. A year later, she also became the first female artist to have a retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum.
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Alicja Kwade
The Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade was born in Poland. Her installations often include stones, glass, chains, mirrors and clocks. A recent piece at the Berliner Galerie consisted of a huge clock swinging from the ceiling on a chain — a memorably hypnotic work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/R. Vennenbernd
Katharina Sieverding
She was one of the first artists to create large-format portraits that openly featured image manipulation. Sieverding was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2017. Her work questions the artistic, political and social conditions behind the production and the reception of art.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/F.Gambarini
Haegue Yang
The Seoul-born Berlin-based artist has held exhibitions throughout the world. For her installations transforming everyday objects into surreal associative works, she often uses materials from the hardware store or household items. At the Documenta 13, she revealed Venetian blinds that moved on their own, making strange sounds. Haegue Yang's pieces are filled with poetry and humor.
Image: Imago/tagesspiegel/M. Wolff
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Radical women artists
In the 20th century, many women have been at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde.
Mary Bauermeister, born in 1934, rented a loft apartment in Cologne in 1959 that became a hub for artistic experimentation. Known as the Atelier Bauermeister, it is where Fluxus artists including Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik and Christo performed or exhibited their works, and avante-garde sound artists like John Cage, David Tudor and La Monte Young performed early concerts.
As an artist, Bauermeister first began her own career in the US and exhibited in renowned American museums and galleries in the 1960s. In 1972, she returned to Germany, where her work was less known for a long time. In 1988, she participated in the group exhibition "Return to the Object: American and European Art from the Fifties and Sixties" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In recent years, her unconventional works have been rediscovered in Europe as well.
20th century German artist Chris Reinecke is largely unknown because as a woman her art was regarded as too political, and radical. With her husband, the Fluxus artist Jörg Immendorff, she founded the Dada-inspired LIDL Academy in Düsseldorf in 1968 and fought for gender equality while also initiating "disturbance actions" at the documenta 4 by invading a press conference and famously kissing artistic director Arnold Bode.
But while the name of her late ex-husband Jörg Immendorff is known internationally, Chris Reinecke's work is absent from German museums, a stark omission that I Love Women in Arts seeks to change.
