On the Artistic Education of Woman (1896)
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A lecture delivered at the International Congress for Women’s Work and Aspirations, Berlin, on Tuesday, 22 September 1896, at 3 p.m. (Chair: Fräulein Laura Herrmann, Frau Sera Pröllss; the session record edited by Rosalie Schoenflies.) Published in the Congress proceedings, Berlin 1897, pp. 148–151. The proceedings print each speaker’s country and city after the name; hers reads ‘Deutschland-Rom’: a German, living in Rome.
On the Artistic Education of Woman
By Hermine von Preuschen-Telmann, Germany–Rome
Esteemed assembly!
It is true that they say “mulier taceat in ecclesia1,” and I have always taken this favourite quotation of men to heart; that is, I have preferred to paint and to write rather than to speak. I also believe that woman always draws the short straw in public speaking, and that in the eyes of the emancipation-hating strong sex2 (which harbours just as many weak souls as the female one does) she will always be a ridiculous figure, disgracing herself, in their view, beyond all measure. I fear that all women’s assemblies are as little use as men’s, and breed exactly as many splits and discords as those do; and that after all, time and again, everything stays just as it was and chokes to death in the sand — to the outward eye. And yet, in spite of all this, I believe in the justification of women’s emancipation — as I believe in the sun. It is in the air, it is of its time, unstoppable.
And their lordships the men had best take care that in centuries and millennia to come we do not arrive once more at the “barbarism of mother-right3.”
Joking aside: a colossal change has nonetheless taken place in the last ten or twenty years.
One simple example makes it clear. While we all still find our fathers’ aversion to so-called emancipation (the word is entirely wrong for what the sensible woman actually wants) perfectly understandable, in our husbands and lovers that same aversion would strike us as antiquated and unintelligible; we would look down on it, with a smile. Just as with that golden phrase constantly on the lips of the opponents of women’s emancipation, about the best woman being the one no one talks about4, which today, thank God, seems to us utterly antediluvian.
In my early youth I believed that emancipation efforts in corpore were only ever good and useful for the average, and that for the woman of genius5 the greater freedom of her sex was, in general, quite superfluous. Genius would force its own way through — over mountain-high obstacles. And I still held the naïve belief that men were impartial; that when a woman truly achieved something great, they would readily acknowledge it, despite the phrase handed down to them through generations: “A woman has never achieved anything in the visual arts, at most as an actress or a singer, where she has nothing of her own to give6.”
In the course of years and experience I have, alas, come away from this view. On the talented, pretty beginner the man looks down good-naturedly, indulgently, keeping an eye on her fingers; but woe to the woman who must be taken seriously, and who dares to achieve as much as, or even more than, the average man. Then even old enemies suddenly form a brotherly, closed phalanx against the intruder, whom they would like to boycott through every country on earth.
“The creature is getting above herself — let us give her one on the head. Women should cook and sew and make the man happy7.”
Yes, honoured gentlemen: a significant woman will always make a man happier than an insignificant one, and a significant woman can, on top of that, do all the things with which a household goose fritters away her youth and her life. — And, with your kind permission, genius8 takes the liberty of not minding about sex; it flies into souls whom and how it will.
But then a man has it much easier to shape his life by it. He is by nature physically stronger; a woman’s brain is so much more subtle. Sometimes it comes out of joint under the strain. And yet the woman who believes herself called to be an artist has far greater difficulties to fight than the man. And even if genius knows little of consideration — most often it is only a little talent9 that wants to make itself a livelihood, exactly like the equally numerous little male talents, which, however, can unfold more easily and less stunted.
In this respect, too, things have already become somewhat better. In my childhood there were still few famous women painters10.
One heard wondrous things of Rosa Bonheur11 and old Baumann-Jerichau12, and then one knew the reproduction of Volkmar’s The New Governess13 and the flowers of Anna Peters14.
Otherwise one looked, with a shrug, past the talentless stuff, the “ladies’-painting needlework.” And now? A hundred names would scarcely suffice to list all the truly significant young European women painters. And that is very galling to the men.
And is it not just the same in literature?
Out of the Marlitt-ade15 a young corps of women writers16 has fledged, bolder and more gifted than many a male colleague. Admittedly, Johanna Ambrosius17’s success is a sharp relapse into the Gartenlaube18 genre. But that, again, their lordships the men alone have on their conscience.
But if already now such a strong sprouting and growth of female talent is to be seen in art, while so many difficulties still hinder us, what will it look like among us a hundred years hence?
Yes, woman’s course is at present on the rise. Until now, to be sure, such a poor young thing who chooses painting as her profession, with the few pennies wrung with difficulty from her parents, is often merely the milking cow for the Herr Professor, who builds himself a princely villa from the fees of his always-overcrowded ladies’ studios, a villa he could never have painted his way to with his own pictures.
For, as far as I know, only in Rome are women permitted to attend the art academy. There they may also draw from the nude, free of charge, together with the men, which in Munich, Berlin, Karlsruhe, and other German art centres would be impossible. True, in recent years special women’s painting schools have been founded in various German cities; but in my view these are actually unnecessary, and more or less only cultivate the dilettantism of the higher daughters. Why not rather open the academies to women?
“Because that would slap femininity in the face, and only tomfoolery would come of it,” say the gentlemen with the pigtail. But one should just try it, as in the Zurich lecture halls19. The women who take art seriously (woman, as is well known, is far more diligent at study than man) are only spurred on by competition with their male colleagues, and relieved by the small financial sacrifices which the academy — compared with the professor’s fee, often fixed at 60—75 marks a month — demands of them. As a result they can feed themselves better during their studies, and make their bodies more resistant to every exertion; their brain then, if a spark of genius really lies in them, is less easily thrown out of joint. “So the art-proletariat is to be enlarged still further, and by the state, if one makes the study of painting easier for the women too,” say the pigtailed men again. But surely it holds for man and woman exactly alike: many are called, but few are chosen20. And in no case does a sound foundation harm women. After all, from the male side they are reproached for the lack of one, again and again, so bitterly. And whoever lacks the talent for paintings of her own creation, it will only the more easily fit for solid work in the applied arts. On the other hand, for want of a firm schooling, even the most brilliant woman21, achieve as much as she might, has all her life to haul as if on a hidden chain, which forever limits her boldest flights, on which her imagination chafes itself raw again and again and lets itself be dragged to the ground.
The self-confidence, too, the artistic courage of women, will be strengthened by making the most thorough preliminary study easier to come by; and the fatal dependence of many a woman painter will cease: she who now, all her life, even when she is old and grey, hangs on the apron-string of a “professor” who, for the sake of his pecuniary advantage, on no account attempts to set her on her own feet.
“The bicycle of our day rides art to death,” one of the old men said to me recently. I would rather say: “The bicycle rides the prejudices to death.” And so let us hope that our daughters will one day have it easier, cheaper, and with less struggle to train their talent, to unfold their powers, to live out their individuality; and that in the coming generation22 one will no longer ask: is the artist man or woman, but only: is it a real artist?23
Then, among the many who are called, the few chosen ones who pant their way up the steep thorny path that leads to the shimmering temple, where the goddess is enthroned who hands them the laurel24 — then women too shall be allowed to wind the imperishable wreath about their brows, without the men seeking to trample it into the dust again. And then, only then, will Alfred Meissner25’s words have lost their tragic truth:
Many crowns there are, dark ones, full of thorns, that God has lent to the children of this earth; but the heaviest, with which the Lord in rancour wreathes a woman’s head, is genius!26
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑mulier taceat in ecclesia — St Paul, 1 Corinthians 14:34 — ‘let women keep silence in the churches.’ The scriptural line long used to bar women from public speech. (1 Corinthians 14:34)
- ↑strong sex — ‘das starke Geschlecht’ — the stock German idiom for men (opposite of ‘das schwache Geschlecht,’ the weak sex = women). ‘Geschlecht’ carries three meanings in these four pages. Here it is sex, as it is again when genius ‘takes the liberty of not minding about sex.’ Later it is generation, ‘in the coming generation.’ And the same word also means grammatical gender.
- ↑barbarism of mother-right — ‘Mutterrecht,’ mother-right, is Bachofen’s term (1861) for a supposed early age when descent and rule ran through the mother. Her encyclopaedia filed it under peoples ‘closer to the state of nature,’ with group marriage and no fathers, which is the ‘barbarism’ she quotes. The threat is a joke: push us, and the swing will not stop at equality. The idea reached most readers of 1896 not through Bachofen but through Engels’s Origin of the Family (1884) and Bebel’s Woman and Socialism (1879), which made the fall of mother-right the first defeat of women. It is unclear who she had read or is referencing. (Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht)
- ↑the best woman being the one no one talks about — A German proverb, ‘Die beste Frau ist die, von der man am wenigsten spricht’ (the best woman is the one talked about least), which Büchmann’s dictionary of quotations traces to Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides: a widow’s greatest glory is to be least talked of among men, for good or ill. (Büchmann, Geflügelte Worte (1898))
- ↑the woman of genius — German ‘das geniale Weib’ — and ‘Weib,’ her usual word for woman, is grammatically neuter, so the phrase that follows is ‘die grössere Freiheit seines Geschlechts’: its sex, not her sex. That is ordinary German grammar rather than a coinage of hers (‘das Mädchen’ behaves the same way), but it means her German cannot call a woman of genius ‘she.’ The next sentence, ‘Es bräche sich auch gewaltsam Bahn,’ then leaves ‘Es’ free to be either the neuter woman or genius itself; English has to choose, and this translation chooses genius.
- ↑A woman has never achieved anything in the visual arts, at most as an actress or a singer, where she has nothing of her own to give — Not her own words but a received cliché — she calls it a “phrase handed down through generations.” It states the era’s “reproductive vs. productive genius” dogma: a woman may perform (as actress or singer) but can create nothing of her own. The dogma was old when she quoted it — Rousseau had written in 1758 that women “have no genius” in art, and its famous version was the conductor Hans von Bülow’s on women composers: “Reproductive genius can be admitted to the pretty sex, but productive genius unconditionally cannot … there will never be a woman composer.” And it outlived her lecture: twelve years after she mocked it here, the art critic Karl Scheffler devoted an entire book — Die Frau und die Kunst (1908) — to the same claim. She named it a tired cliché in 1896; the men went on repeating it in earnest. (Scheffler, Die Frau und die Kunst (1908))
- ↑The creature is getting above herself — let us give her one on the head. Women should cook and sew and make the man happy — Her impersonation of male prejudice — not a real quotation. ‘Cook, sew, and make the man happy’ restates the ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (children, kitchen, church) ideal of woman’s place. (Kinder, Küche, Kirche)
- ↑genius — ‘das Genie’ — neuter, and the one professional word German cannot mark as female: there is no ‘Genieïn,’ where ‘Künstlerin,’ ‘Malerin’ and ‘Dichterin’ are always marked. So a woman who is a genius is ‘ein Genie,’ in exactly the form a man would be — which is why her reported boast ‘Ich bin ein Genie’ takes the word without qualifying it. Her phrase here is ‘sich nicht ans Geschlecht zu kehren,’ not to mind about Geschlecht: sex, in this sentence. The same word returns a page later meaning generation.
- ↑a little talent — ‘Talentchen’ — the ‑chen diminutive, which in German belittles as readily as it endears; the male ones a line later are ‘Männertalentchen.’ English can only reach for an adjective (‘little’), so the sneer arrives as a judgement she has added; in German it is built into the noun — and she applies it evenhandedly to the mediocrities of both sexes.
- ↑women painters — ‘Malerinnen.’ German marks the female practitioner with ‑in, so every trade word in this lecture — Malerin, Künstlerin, Schriftstellerin — announces the sex of whoever holds it. That is the asymmetry the whole argument rests on: the words for what she does are compulsorily female, while ‘das Genie,’ the word for what she claims to be, has no female form at all. English marks neither, and so shows neither half.
- ↑Rosa Bonheur — Rosa Bonheur (1822–99), the celebrated French animal painter. (Rosa Bonheur)
- ↑Baumann-Jerichau — Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1819–81), Polish-Danish painter. (Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann)
- ↑The New Governess — ‘die neue Gouvernante von der Volkmar’ — the article is feminine, and the picture is Antonie Volkmar’s Die neue Erzieherin (1868), which the 1882 artist lexicon counts among her best works. Antonie Volkmar (1827–1903), a Berlin portrait and genre painter trained under Julius Schrader and, in Paris, Léon Cogniet. She taught Clara von Rappard, whose name stands next to Preuschen’s in a Kunstchronik notice of 1896. That a lecture on women’s art training can call her simply ‘the Volkmar’ is a measure of how well known she was. (Antonie Volkmar)
- ↑Anna Peters — Anna Peters (1843–1926), German flower and still-life painter. (Anna Peters)
- ↑Marlitt-ade — The vogue for Eugenie Marlitt (1825–87), best-selling novelist of the family magazine Die Gartenlaube. (Eugenie Marlitt)
- ↑corps of women writers — ‘ein junges Schriftstellerinnenkorps’ — one word in the German, with the female ‑innen buried in the middle of a military noun. Her compounds work like this throughout: the corps ‘hat sich gemausert,’ has moulted or fledged, a bird-word for a regiment. English needs five words and loses the effect of a whole battalion of ‑innen packed into a single noun.
- ↑Johanna Ambrosius — The ‘peasant poet’ Johanna Ambrosius (1854–1939), a 1890s literary sensation she reads as a step backward. (Johanna Ambrosius)
- ↑Gartenlaube — Die Gartenlaube — the hugely popular German family magazine; a byword for sentimental fiction. (Die Gartenlaube)
- ↑Zurich lecture halls — The University of Zurich was the pioneer among German-speaking universities in admitting women (from the 1860s) — her standing proof that mixed study already worked. (University of Zurich)
- ↑many are called, but few are chosen — Matthew 22:14, recast as the few true artists who reach the temple of fame. (Matthew 22:14)
- ↑the most brilliant woman — ‘das genialste Weib’ — neuter again, and the German keeps it up across the whole sentence: ‘sein Leben lang,’ ‘seine kühnsten Flüge,’ ‘seine Phantasie.’ Three times ‘its,’ where English must say ‘her.’ This is the climax of her case, and in German it is carried entirely by neuter pronouns — the same neuter as ‘das Genie.’ A reader in English meets a woman dragging her chain; a reader in German meets a grammatical it that the language leaves ungendered.
- ↑the coming generation — ‘im kommenden Geschlecht’ — the word she used earlier for sex now means generation. German gets both from ‘Geschlecht’; English needs two different words. It is also the hinge of the sentence: the Geschlecht that must stop mattering (sex) and the Geschlecht that will stop asking (the generation to come) are the same word, a page apart.
- ↑is it a real artist? — ‘ist es ein wirklicher Künstler?’ — she writes ‘es,’ it, where German grammar expects ‘er’ for ‘der Künstler.’ The odd-sounding English ‘it’ is exact. The sentence keeps the masculine noun and strips the pronoun of sex: the future she is asking for is one in which the artist is grammatically an it. A translation that tidies this to ‘he’ or ‘they’ deletes the argument.
- ↑the laurel — The laurel wreath — classical emblem of artistic triumph and immortality, from the myth of Apollo and Daphne (the nymph became a laurel tree; Apollo made its leaves his sign of honour). (the laurel wreath)
- ↑Alfred Meissner — Alfred Meißner (1822–85), German-Bohemian poet; the closing quatrain is from his poem to George Sand. The Gartenlaube for 1867 quotes the same four lines as Meißner’s ‘poem to George Sand,’ in a slightly different wording — ‘seiner Erde,’ ‘mit der der Herr,’ ‘Ein Weibeshaupt bekränzt’ — so she quotes from memory, or from another printing. Its place in his collected verse is not identified in this project. (Die Gartenlaube, 1867, quoting the poem)
- ↑a woman’s head, is genius! — Two neuters meet in the closing line — ‘das Haupt,’ inside the coarse old compound ‘Weiberhaupt,’ and ‘das Genie’: ‘Ein Weiberhaupt umkränzt, ist das Genie!’ Meißner’s verse is a lament — genius is the heaviest crown God lends a woman — and she quotes it to argue that it is about to stop being true. Four pages of argument land on the one word German cannot make female.
About the book
On 22 September 1896 Preuschen addressed the International Congress for Women’s Work and Aspirations in Berlin. Her lecture Über das künstlerische Studium der Frau (“On the Artistic Education of Woman”) is her feminism in her own voice — witty, combative, and specific. Its demand is concrete: open the art academies to women. At the time, she notes, only Rome let women study at the academy and draw from the nude alongside men; Munich, Berlin, and Karlsruhe forbade it, fobbing women off with separate “ladies’ painting schools” that “only cultivate the dilettantism of the higher daughters.”
Published in the Congress proceedings (Berlin, 1897, pp. 148–151); public domain, and now freely available open-access. The English above is the first translation anywhere.