Von Genies und Musen (English shop)

Künstlerpaare des 20. Jahrhunderts in bildender Kunst, Literatur und Theater

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This dissertation on the topic “Von Genies und Musen. Künstlerpaare der Moderne in bildender Kunst, Literatur und Theater” (“Of Geniuses and Muses. Artist Couples of Modernism in the Visual Arts, Literature and Theatre”) aims, through its interdisciplinary and methodologically discursive approach, to make a contribution to various fields of scholarship, such as gender and cultural studies or sociology. The extensive aesthetic concepts of four selected artist couples (Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp, Claire and Ivan Goll, Marta and Wilhelm Worringer, as well as Louise Dumont and Gustav Lindemann) are elaborated in exemplary fashion and, following the individual analyses, compared with one another. The findings on Marta and Wilhelm Worringer as well as on Louise Dumont and Gustav Lindemann in particular have proved significant for cultural- and regional-historical research in the Rhineland.

Beyond the examination of the models of production aesthetics, previously unconsidered and inaccessible documents also yield research-relevant results concerning the private relationship patterns of the individual couples. In the process, analogous patterns with regard to production aesthetics become apparent within the collaborative work of the artist couples examined, and the reflection of artistic-historical models within the couple discourse becomes recognisable as a template by which the joint oeuvre is situated within the context of modernism. It thus emerges that the conscious and critical engagement with literary and visual-artistic traditions of different epochs is characteristic of artist couples in modernism and forms the basis of a new aesthetic concept of modernity that still constitutes the foundation of our understanding of aesthetics today. Examining the couple relationships from a sociological perspective makes clear that the discourse on a contemporary ontology of gender is also mirrored in the two-gender artist team: even in these creative constellations, as the study shows, women are strongly shaped by traditional images of femininity and adopt them. This specific understanding of roles manifests itself in the collaborative work, but above all on the level of the private relationship. The joint artistic work also shows, however, that these women overcome the myth of the male genius and his female muse through the practical design of their lives: the traditional role models lose their validity, even though the women remain bound to conservative patterns of thought. This ambivalent stance between emancipation and traditional value conceptions can be assessed as a phenomenon typical of the era of modernism.