With a selection of 135 works – paintings, drawings, notebooks and sketchbooks filled with poems and compositions – this retrospective offers an in-depth overview of the oeuvre of Else Blankenhorn (1873–1920), the best-known woman artist from the Prinzhorn Collection.
Blankenhorn, who lost her voice at the age of 26 after a disappointment in love, composed and played music, produced photographs, wrote, translated, knitted and worked in embroidery before beginning to draw and paint in 1908. Inspired by Symbolism, Expressionism and Japanese art, she developed her own artistic visual idiom: an expressive painting featuring simplified forms, energetic brushstrokes and bold color contrasts.
The retrospective highlights the variety of themes in her work from her numerous self-portraits in various identities (from singer and composer to a defiant tree-woman to a crowned empress consort), to the banknotes she produced in order to finance the resurrection of couples, a charitable task assigned, she believed, by Emperor Wilhelm II, her “spiritual husband.”
