Berlin Art Week | Neither Fat nor Felt

Who remembers the Second Women's Movement? Of those who are active in feminist activities today, probably not many. Most weren't old enough in the 1970s to be actively involved in the movement, or hadn't even been born yet. You can't blame them for that. Feminist discourse has also changed, which is why connecting with the protagonists of the Sexual Revolution from West and East Germany may seem difficult today. The concept of transgender, for example, played a minor role back then and was viewed critically or even rejected by many feminist movements. Nevertheless, there were still similar debates about many things as there are today – for example, about how much women were allowed to conform to the "male gaze," and how much staged female beauty and sexuality was acceptable or betrayed the cause.

Two second-wave feminists in West Germany who, in their own way, never renounced beauty and elegance—or what they perceived as beautiful and elegant—were the artist Sarah Schumann (1933–2019) and her friend and life partner, the writer Silvia Bovenschen (1946–2017). In her book "Sarah's Law" (2015), which she wrote about Schumann, Bovenschen describes her first encounter with a picture of her friend, a collage. It depicts a beautiful, seated woman, "almost life-size," in front of a landscape with rocks, trees, and animals that are "reduced in perspective, shuffled into a wondrous distance."

Bovenschen, who barely knew Schumann at the time, briefly wondered at the sight of the opulent, colorful collage whether she "should approve of it." After all, she, too, had internalized the "unspoken art-theoretical avant-garde dogma of this era"—she was talking about the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. Shortly thereafter, she dismissed the idea, saying she couldn't help it, "succumbing to the power of the image." Over the course of the following years together—around 40—she not only wrote numerous essays about her friend's collages and paintings, but also repeatedly became Schumann's artistic subject herself.

»...and she never uses wrapping paper!«

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Some of these Boven portraits—along with numerous other works by Schumann from 1954 to 1982—are currently on display at the Meyer Riegger Gallery in Berlin. As part of Berlin Art Week, with over 100 museums, project spaces, and galleries in the capital ringing in the autumn art season this weekend, the "quasi-museum" exhibition, according to the press release, opened last Thursday.

The truly extensive exhibition material is spread across two floors. On display are over 60 of Schumann's "shock collages" (1957–1964) – small-format, black-and-white and sepia-toned paper collages or photographs of them, which are part of her early work. In addition, there are the Art Informel paintings that brought Schumann, then still known as Maria Brockstedt, her first artistic success in the late 1950s, as well as other collages, both small and colorful. Furthermore, there are cover designs and other illustrations for feminist publications, as well as large-format canvas and wood panels on which, also in collage form, color photographs of people meet oil paint, plaster, charcoal, gold and silver bronze, pencil, and other materials. Sarah Schumann was by no means a minimalist.

At the heart of this exhibition is the artist's exploration of female sub- and objectivity. In her "shock collages," Sarah Schumann places, among other things, women's bodies and heads cut out of photographs—occasionally those of children, but only rarely does the image of a man find its way into the work—in oversized landscapes that are not necessarily inviting, but rather marked by natural disasters or human destruction.

These images play with distant representational traditions, such as Renaissance painting or ancient sculpture. They are surreal, yet not removed from the social reality of the second half of the last century in which they were created. When, for example, a female figure with a rifle in her hand wanders beneath barbed wire on the Hungarian border, or a weeping, barefoot girl—presumably taken from a photograph taken in Vietnam during the war—is depicted as a giantess lying on or in a canal between woods, political references are easily established.

Schumann's later collages emerged from working with a broader spectrum of materials. The artist now uses not only sections of paper photographs, but also illustrations of the human anatomy, as well as human hair, peacock feathers, dried flowers, and leaves. These are small, delicate compositions, the individual pieces artfully intertwined, playful and almost preppy.

In "Sarah's Law," Bovenschen recalls how a journalist once exclaimed upon seeing her friend's collage: "... and she never uses wrapping paper!" Bovenschen adds: "He could have just as easily said grease or felt." No, Sarah Schumann's aesthetic cosmos has nothing in common with Joseph Beuys' grease and felt artworks, which captured the zeitgeist in West Germany (and elsewhere) in the 1970s.

This can also be interpreted politically: Schumann's work does not push back toward an imagined primality and naturalness, but rather stages humanity, and especially women, as social beings. Liberation from social ills can only be found in the further development of civilization. And contrary to what some difference feminists claimed in the 1970s, there is nothing genuinely feminine outside of the body and its functions, thus classified. Woman is "not born a woman, but is made one" (Simone de Beauvoir).

Sarah Schumann's work is complemented at the Meyer Riegger Gallery by Harun Farocki's film "A Picture of Sarah Schumann" (1976/78), which documents the creation of one of the artist's works, and a reworking of Michaela Mélian's video installation (2012) for the exhibition "Women Artists International 1877–1977." An integral part of the installation is a video in which Schumann and Bovenschen recall the 1977 exhibition they and several fellow campaigners organized at Berlin's Charlottenburg Palace. At that time, they succeeded in attracting museums from around the world to their project, which aimed to give greater recognition to female artists. The exhibition featured works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Diane Arbus, Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Maria Lassnig, Louise Bourgeois, and others—many of these works, Bovenschen writes in "Sarah's Law," were the first she herself saw in the original.

Today, it's hard to imagine the level of resistance the exhibition organizers encountered. In her book, Bovenschen recalls "foaming protests" and "misogynistic yells of abuse," but also "shrill fundamental feminists." "Some proclaimed once again that women, by virtue of their natural endowment and social destiny, were neither capable nor entitled to art; others argued that all women, without exception, were artists and that, therefore, any selection process was a misogynistic impertinence."

Bovenschen, Schumann, and their friends were unfazed by all this and carried on with their own cause. This is not only worth remembering, but can also serve as inspiration for contemporary feminist movements that don't want to dumb down.

"Sarah Schumann: Paintings and Collages from 1954 to 1982," until November 1, 2025, Galerie Meyer Riegger. The complete program of Berlin Art Week (September 10 to 14) can be found at: www.berlinartweek.de