Friendship in Representation

The Collaborative Portraits by Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann

Carina Rech
Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University

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.

Introduction

[1] This paper explores a series of friendship portraits created by the Scandinavian painters Jeanna Bauck (1840-1926) and Bertha Wegmann (1846-1926). Drawing on performative approaches to portraiture, which highlight the sitter’s share in the making of an image, I understand the works as collaborative endeavors in (self-) representation. Through their mediated self-representation, I argue that Bauck and Wegmann developed a shared identity in painting, thereby exploring new ways of visualizing their professional role and challenging late nineteenth-century gender hierarchies. Beyond providing close readings of three selected paintings, this article presents comprehensive, to this day unpublished archival evidence from the estate of their close friend Hildegard Thorell (1850-1930), a fellow artist. The correspondence between the three colleagues reveals not only new, critical information on the paintings and their creation, but also pays vivid testimony to the sense of community among aspiring women artists in that period.

Role Reversal in the Studio

[2] In the beginning of the movie The Danish Girl (2015), the camera enters the Copenhagen workshop of the art nouveau painter Gerda Wegener (1886-1940), played by Alicia Vikander. An unknown and rather stiff gentleman has taken a seat on a small pedestal to have his portrait painted, apparently feeling quite uncomfortable. As he tries to get a glimpse of the canvas on which the artist is working, Wegener observes him closely and picks up on his uneasiness. Rather amused and smoking a cigarette, she ironically comments upon his behavior: "It’s hard for a man to be looked at by a woman. Women are used to it of course, but for a man to submit to a woman’s gaze …. It’s unsettling."¹ In this initial scene, Gerda Wegener refers to the common rules of the gaze and gender hierarchies in art, as they traditionally play out between a male artist and his female model in the studio space.

[3] This theme of reversed gazes plays a crucial role in an interior painting by the Swedish artist Jeanna Bauck, which probably originated in the 1870s in Munich (Fig. 1). It shows a scene strikingly similar to the above-mentioned filmic encounter. Bauck has depicted her fellow colleague and friend, the Dane Bertha Wegmann painting the portrait of a Bourgeois gentleman sitting in a chair in the artist’s studio. Through Bauck’s eyes we are observing Wegmann at work. Speaking with Wegener in the film scene, the male sitter has to submit to a double female gaze: that of Wegmann studying her model, and that of Bauck observing the sitting. If we include the beholder’s gaze coming from outside the picture plane, it adds up to three observers, and the genre scene from a portraitist’s studio turns into a comment on women artists’ social position and gender hierarchies in nineteenth-century visual culture. The studio eventually unfolds as a space in which subversive acts in representing female artistic agency become possible.

1 Jeanna Bauck, The Danish Artist Bertha Wegmann Painting a Portrait, 1870s, oil on canvas, 100 x 110 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Public domain)

[4] The painting’s unusual subject matter reverses the patriarchal economy of the gaze in an immediate manner.² In her influential article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey employed psychoanalytic theory to argue that classic Hollywood movies inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, while the woman on screen figures as an object of desire for the male gaze.³ Mulvey’s argument holds true for the underlying gendered dynamics of vision in the nineteenth century, according to which men were to embody active looking, while women were to be looked at or displayed.⁴ However, as Alexandra K. Wettlaufer recently has claimed in relation to the nineteenth-century French and British contexts,

Significant numbers of women artists worked within and against structures of the gaze to claim a (contested) subject position, and the radical image of a female subject representing the world presented an unmistakable challenge to social and aesthetic ideologies with a canny nod to the power of vision.⁵

Accordingly, in her studio interior Jeanna Bauck subverts patriarchal structures of the gaze and counteracts the objectification of women in painting.

[5] Presumably, contemporary observers would immediately have reacted upon the unusual subject matter of a woman painter. In 1895, Bertha Wegmann attracted attention both in the Danish and Swedish press, when she refused to visit a portrait commissioner for a sitting in his home, even though it was the prime minister J. B. S. Estrup. Instead, she insisted upon executing the portrait in her studio. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet accounted for the incident under the unmistakably ironic headline One Who Estrup Could Not Subdue, stating that Estrup eventually had to look for another portraitist, as both artist and sitter had refused to give in.⁶

[6] The subversive role reversal in the studio contrasts with the conventional representation of the interior itself. As in many other studio interiors of the time, seemingly without any systemization furniture, objects, requisites, paintings, casts, replicas and the like are arranged in artful disarray. One can detect numerous objects in the two women’s shared studio, all of them delicately rendered, ranging from a portfolio containing drawings and prints to a replica of the Venus de Milo on the chest of drawers in the back. A parasol emulating Asian style adds that little twist of exoticism that every decent studio was supposed to possess. In front of the window to the right some plants, a wine bottle, a collection of paint brushes and a hand mirror form an old-masterly still life. The interior balances between some sort of gentle bohemianism, humble inwardness and rooted domesticity, which is commonly found in nineteenth-century historicist studio interiors.⁷ On the back wall one can make out the outlines of a portrait head, which I suggest may be Woman in Black by Bertha Wegmann from 1872 (Fig. 2).⁸ The composition, consisting of a veiled person dressed in black and represented in profile next to a trapezoid shape, although executed rather sketchily, clearly corresponds to the painting in the Nationalmuseum collection.

2 Bertha Wegmann, Woman in Black, 1872, oil on canvas, 51 x 42 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Public domain)

A Double(d) Portrait

[7] On another level, the studio interior reflects Bauck’s and Wegmann’s artistic partnership and collaboration. While Wegmann is painting inside the picture, Bauck outside simultaneously works on a representation of her friend. Imaging the working situation, Bauck and Wegmann thus share in a double-layered performance of portrayal.⁹ Furthermore, the scene is set in their shared working space, which is filled with objects owned by the two artists. The combined materiality of these objects thus alludes to Bauck’s indirect presence in the studio. The setting of the interior seems dense and rather enclosed, revolving around the concentrated atmosphere of the portrait session. Bauck has depicted Wegmann from behind as she concentrates on her canvas, a rather traditional compositional measure that invites the viewer’s identification with the represented. Bauck identifies with and subjectifies her colleague at the same time by highlighting the shared act of portrayal, rather than letting the beholder dwell on the physiognomic features of her friend. Eventually a double portrait reveals itself, in which both painters visibly act as artists at the same time: Bauck as the author of the work itself and Wegmann as the painter depicted inside of it. As Marsha Meskimmon has pointed out in relation to self-portraiture, to oscillate between subject- and object-positions has a range of critical implications for women artists:

[…] self-portraiture is implicated in the complex interweaving of the subject and object roles we play. The author of the self-portrait is both subject and object. For women, this interaction is particularly critical. Woman has been the object of art for centuries, while women have remained marginalized as producers. To act in both roles, simultaneously, is to stage a crucial intervention.¹⁰

[8] Employing this argument, Jeanna Bauck’s studio interior forms a crucial intervention as it represents two women as producers of a shared artwork on different levels, both within and outside the picture plane, while transferring the object role to the male sitter. Imagining that peculiar doubled portrait sitting, the two women artists reproduce one another’s gestures: In the painting, Wegmann puts her brush on the canvas, while Bauck consequently does the same when painting Wegmann at work. Interestingly, what we see on Wegmann’s easel is not the portrait of the gentleman she is working on, but rather the artist’s head which is framed by her own canvas. Hence, Bertha Wegmann turns into a portrait head on her own painting, which implies that she is partly working on her own representation. Paraphrasing a term coined by art historian Ewa Lajer-Burcharth in relation to the interaction between painter and sitter in early-modern portraiture, the studio interior transforms into Wegmann’s own mediated self-representation by the hands of her artist friend Jeanna Bauck.¹¹ The clear division between the roles of the painter and the represented blurs in a manner usually only characteristic for self-portraiture. Wegmann imagines herself through Bauck’s touch, allowing the colleague to invent her as an artist in the act of painting and on the canvas inside the picture. Eventually, the scenery in the studio turns into a double(d) portrait of Bauck and Wegmann, understood as a depiction of their shared professional identity and mutual identification, thereby revealing the two artists’ shared authorship.¹²

[9] Although Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann were successful artists in their day – receiving numerous commissions, leading their own drawing schools and exhibiting frequently – interest in their work within Scandinavia has only recently emerged. While increasingly represented in exhibitions, to date neither of them has been the subject of substantial research.¹³ The artists’ close friendship over many years resulted in a number of paintings that revolve around their shared artistic identity, their profession as painters and the studio: Three portraits of Bauck by Wegmann dating from 1881¹⁴, 1885 (previously dated 1887)¹⁵ and 1905¹⁶ are housed in public collections in both Sweden and Denmark. For a painting begun in 1885 and completed as late as 1925, today in private ownership and entitled Two Friends Drinking Tea in the Artist’s Studio (Fig. 3), Wegmann, as I suggest, has represented Bauck as the guest to the left.¹⁷

3 Bertha Wegmann, Two Friends Drinking Tea in the Artist’s Studio, 1885-1925, oil on canvas, 133 x 189 cm. Private collection (photograph © Bruun Rasmussen Kunstauktioner)

The same applies to a drawing in the National Gallery of Denmark representing a similar scene of two ladies in dialogue in the studio: the left with curly hair probably is Bauck.¹⁸ The small booklet published on the occasion of Wegmann’s retrospective exhibition in Charlottenborg in 1926 lists one more portrait: Portrait ofJanna [sic] Bauck in a White Silkdress, oval, in possession of Ella Hans-Nicolai Hansen, Fredensborg from 1889.¹⁹ Bauck painted Wegmann only once on the above discussed occasion.²⁰ Following these attributions, there are seven friendship portraits and interiors that exist or are known to have existed. The total number could be higher; the scarce literature on the artist friends tends to state around twenty existing portraits without giving any supporting evidence.²¹ Those who have briefly addressed Bauck’s and Wegmann’s mutual representations in interiors and portraits have tended to reflect upon the works’ unique characteristics as "intense depictions" and "penetrating portraits".²² Researchers have highlighted their particular "presence"²³ and "humanism"²⁴, finally reading them, such as Lise Svanholm, as "portraits of two people: the sitter and the artist herself".²⁵ The importance of the artists’ friendship and the crucial position of the works that resulted from it have been acknowledged from the start.

Hildegard Thorell’s Correspondence

[10] Apart from the existing paintings, little has been known about the artists’ relationship beyond Wegmann’s brief mentions of Bauck in the letters to her Danish family and acquaintances in the collection of the Royal Library and the Hirschsprung archives in Copenhagen.²⁶ The Swede Jeanna Bauck and the Dane Bertha Wegmann met in Munich in 1871 at the latest. In a letter from December that year Wegmann mentions Bauck for the first time, calling her "a quite talented landscape painter".²⁷ Both artists had arrived in the city in the late 1860s to pursue their artistic careers and to take private lessons from several teachers associated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.²⁸ In autumn 1879 both left for Paris. Whereas Wegmann eventually settled in Copenhagen in 1883, Bauck returned to Germany where she lived throughout the rest of her life. She settled permanently in Munich, but for a short period, in 1896 and 1897, she worked in Berlin as a teacher at a private drawing school for women founded by the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen, where she was Paula Modersohn-Becker’s mentor.²⁹

[11] In contrast to the formal letters in the Copenhagen archives, the previously unknown and unpublished correspondence with their mutual friend Hildegard Thorell is private and intimate in character and revolves mostly around their shared professional concerns and artistic practices.³⁰ Wegmann had not only portrayed Thorell in Paris in 1880, but she was also her tutor over many years. The letters, therefore, offer a new lens to understand Wegmann’s role as a teacher. The comprehensive documentation in the archive of Nordiska Museet in Stockholm comprises 38 letters totaling nearly 200 pages in length written by Bauck and Wegmann, several of which were composed jointly during study periods spent together.³¹ A close reading of these letters allows us to map out the course of their relationship and their manifold collaborative practices as well as to learn about their most intimate views on both life and art. In addition to the letters by Bauck and Wegmann, the collection further includes the extensive correspondence between Hildegard Thorell and her husband Reinhold, comprising 123 letters from her sojourns in Paris in 1879/80 and 1881, in which the colleagues are frequently mentioned. These letters additionally provide an onlooker’s view on the artistic partnership between Bauck and Wegmann.³²

[12] Although the correspondence in Nordiska Museet considerably extends our knowledge about these artists, it is a source that needs to be studied critically. Just like the portrait, the letter is a genre with specific conventions that evokes certain emotions through formalized expressions. For instance, it is important to be aware of the fact that the friends express longing partly because they actually feel it, but partly because such is a convention in letter writing. The letter is thus both a historical source and a verbal construct.³³ As Regina Nörtemann has pointed out, the letter serves as the direct, every-day communication between the sender and the recipient, but it is also a literary medium for self-expression and representation that possesses a certain degree of fictionality.³⁴ However, fiction is not tantamount to untrue or even false. As the literary theorist Paul John Eakin has remarked in his study on autobiographical writing, "[…] autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and self-creation, and […] the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure."³⁵ Eakin proposes that both fiction and the process of fiction-making are integral to "[…] the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentation of that life".³⁶ Consequently, whenever we encounter Bauck and Wegmann in words or in paint, we need to be aware of the fictionality and construction of self-representation across varying media.

[13] Thorell met Bauck and Wegmann for the first time in Paris in the late fall of 1879, when all three artists were living in a guest house on Rue de Bruxelles and studying at Madame Trélat de Lavigne’s atelier.³⁷ Wegmann’s Study of a Female Model (Fig. 4) likely dates from this joint period at the private academy.

4 Bertha Wegmann, Study of a Female Model, oil on canvas, 66 x 57 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (Public domain)

In December 1879, when Bauck was still awaiting Wegmann’s arrival in the French capital, Thorell offers a lively description of the Swedish painter (Fig. 5):

Jeanna Bauck is amongst the most adorable people I have met in my life. The first impression, i.e. her appearance is not taking – she looks like a student with her short hair but that similarity disappears as soon as you talk to her. She seems exceptionally mild, bright, modest and always with bon courage. She is 39 years old, which I almost could not believe, but she told me today. She is awaiting an intimate friend and even prominent painter from Munich, Miss Wegmann, Danish, who also will be living here. […] I almost dare to say that Jeanna and I have already become good friends.³⁸

5 Jeanna Bauck, photograph, Fr. Hanfstaengl. Münchner Stadtbibliothek – Monacensia, Munich (photograph © Stadtbibliothek / Monacensia, MKG/ Mappe Bauck)

[14] A few weeks later, after the Dane’s arrival, Thorell remarks upon Wegmann’s personality and her relationship to Bauck: "Bertha is a sensitive nature, […] and it would not happen, even just for an hour that Jeanna would separate from her."³⁹ Thorell, upon realizing Wegmann’s skill as an artist, decided to take private lessons from her new acquaintance, stating: "she has taken me under her wings."⁴⁰ In return, Thorell posed for her new teacher: "Then after lunch I was to sit myself for Bertha Wegmann for a painting, which she intends to sell. I wish I could afford to buy it […]. She shall paint me with my generally much admired green hat and new coat, which both together should give a most stylish impression."⁴¹

6 Bertha Wegmann, Hildegard Thorell, the Artist, 1880, oil on canvas, 27 x 22 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Public domain)

Later, Wegmann gave the portrait to Thorell, who immediately wished to send it home as a gift to her husband.⁴² The friend had only needed one and a half days to finish the likeness, which Thorell later claimed did not quite resemble her after all.⁴³ Wegmann’s small-scale portrait of her pupil (Fig. 6) with its tactility in the textiles and softness of the skin presents Thorell as a fashionable lady, like a true Parisienne, attentively looking back at the admired tutor.

[15] Under Wegmann’s guidance, Thorell completed the portrait of Miss Gay (Fig. 7), a widowed American, who was living with her daughter in the same house as the Scandinavian artists. By comparing the fine tactility of the fur-trimmed coats that frame the sitters’ slightly reddened cheeks, one can discern Wegmann’s influence on Thorell’s development as an artist.