Hermione von Preuschen 1854 – 1918

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On the Artistic Education of Woman (1896)

from Über das künstlerische Studium der Frau · 1896 · in-review

New English translation (AI-assisted, under review). Translated from the public-domain German original. This is a first draft meant to make her work readable in English — not a definitive edition. The German source is here.

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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; recorded by Rosalie Schoenflies.) Published in the Congress proceedings, Berlin 1897, pp. 148–151.

On the Artistic Education of Woman

By Hermine von Preuschen-Telmann, Germany–Rome

Esteemed assembly!

It is true that they say “mulier taceat in ecclesia” — let woman be silent in the church — 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 sex — 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 in the end everything stays as it was and is smothered 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 timely; it is unstoppable.

And the gentlemen had best take care that we do not, in centuries and millennia, arrive once more at the “barbarism of mother-right.”

In earnest: a colossal change has taken place nonetheless 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 perfectly understandable — the word is entirely wrong for what the sensible woman actually wants — 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 we now do — thank God — with that golden phrase forever in the mouths of emancipation’s opponents, about “the best woman being the one no one talks about,” which today already seems to us utterly antediluvian.

In my early youth I believed that emancipation efforts en masse were only ever good and useful for the average, and that for the woman of genius the greater freedom of her sex was, in general, quite superfluous — that 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 give.”

In the course of years and experience I have, alas, come away from this view. At the talented, pretty beginner the man looks down good-naturedly, indulgently, over her fingers; but woe to the woman who must be taken seriously, and who dares to achieve as much as — or more than — the average man. Then 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 happy.”

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, genius takes the liberty of not minding about sex; it flies into souls whom and how it will.

There, of course, 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 goes off its hinges under the strain. And yet the woman who believes herself called to be an artist has far greater difficulties to fight than the man. Even if genius knows few considerations — most often it is only a little talent that wants to make itself a livelihood, exactly like the just-as-many little male talents, which, however, can unfold more easily and less stuntedly.

In this respect, too, things have already improved. In my childhood there were still few famous women painters. One heard wondrous things of Rosa Bonheur and old Baumann-Jerichau; one knew the reproduction of Volkmar’s The New Governess and the flowers of Anna Peters. Otherwise one looked, with a shrug, past the talentless stuff, the “ladies’-painting handwork.” 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-ade a young corps of women writers has fledged, bolder and more gifted than many a male colleague. Admittedly, Johanna Ambrosius’s success is a strong relapse into the Gartenlaube magazine genre — but that, again, the gentlemen 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 halls. 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 sacrifice the academy demands of them, compared with the professor’s fee, often fixed at sixty to seventy-five marks a month. 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, less easily goes off its hinges. “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 chosen. And a sound foundation harms women in no case — its lack is the very thing thrown at them, again and again so bitterly, from the male side. Whoever’s talent does not suffice for self-creative paintings will only be the more readily enabled for solid works of applied art. On the other hand, for want of a firm schooling, even the most brilliant woman — achieve as much as she might — has all her life to drag as if at a secret chain, which forever limits her boldest flights, on which her imagination chafes itself raw again and again and is dragged to the ground.

The self-confidence, too — the artistic courage of women — will be strengthened by the easier possibility of the most thorough preliminary study; 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, takes good care never 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 less full of struggle to train their talent, to unfold their powers, to live out their individuality; and that in the coming generation one will no longer ask: is the artist man or woman? — but only: is it a real artist?

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 laurel — 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 Meissner’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 wrath wreathes a woman’s head, is genius!

Notes & references

Sources for the quotations and allusions — hover the dashed terms above for a quick note. Added by this project; not in the original.