Berlin Women Artists in the "Golden" 1920s

The 1920s in Berlin were far more than an era of cultural awakening - they were the product of profound social upheaval. Defeat in the First World War, the collapse of the monarchy, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in 1918 had shaken the old order and made room for new social forces, among them a growing women's movement that was now making itself felt in art and culture.

A central symbol of this shift was women's suffrage, introduced in 1918, alongside the gradual opening of academic institutions to women. From 1919 onwards, women were for the first time permitted to study at the Berlin Academy of Arts - a right previously denied to them, which had forced many into artistic exile or into private art schools. Jeanne Mammen had studied at the Brussels Academy, Hannah Höch had taken the route through the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule. Lotte Laserstein belonged to the pioneering generation that benefited directly from this opening - and at the Academy she even found female role models in teaching positions: Käthe Kollwitz and, later, Renée Sintenis, which amounted to a double breaking of taboos.

These artists created their work in a city torn between inflation and modernisation, between political radicalisation and cultural explosion - at once the capital of the avant-garde and a seismograph of deep social contradictions. How directly this tension registered in art is vividly illustrated by the exhibition "Ruin und Rausch" at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

On this occasion, art historian Thomas R. Hoffmann brings the works of Mammen, Höch, Laserstein, Kollwitz, and Sintenis into dialogue, asking how these women - outsiders in the art world and witnesses to a time of rupture - perceived, interpreted, and shaped their era.

Photo: Thomas Hoffmann (c) Helen Nicolai