0202 Friendship in Representation

The Collaborative Portraits by Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann

Abstract

Over a quarter-century, the Scandinavian artists Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann painted a series of portraits and interiors in which they commented upon their shared identity as women artists while migrating between the artistic centers of Munich, Paris, and Copenhagen. Drawing from feminist and performance theory, and concentrating on three paintings in which Bauck and Wegmann imagine one another as emerging professional artists by mediated self-representation, the paper discusses the two artists’ collaborative practices. The artists’ correspondence with their mutual friend and colleague Hildegard Thorell, kept in the archive of Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, is presented here for the first time and provides important insights into their artistic companionship. This case study forms part of an ongoing dissertation project on Nordic women painters’ self-representations in the late nineteenth century.