- Artist/Maker:
- Gert Wollheim
- Bio:
- American, b. German, 1894-1974
- Title:
- Untitled (Couple)
- Date:
- 1926
- Medium:
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions:
- 39 1/2 × 29 1/2 in. (100.3 × 74.9 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Gift of Charlotte Levite in memory of Julius Nassau
- Accession Number:
- 1990-130
Not On View
As with so many artists of his generation, Gert Wollheim's art and politics were dramatically shaped by his experience on the frontline during World War I. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Wollheim studied at the Art Academy of Weimar before serving on the battlefield, then settled in Düsseldorf after Germany's defeat. Fierce with antiwar rage and leftist politics, Wollheim participated in the experimental liberalism of Das junge Rheinland and the radical group Aktivistenbund 1919. From the trenches, Wollheim had sketched with graphic realism the contortions and anguish of a soldier's experience, and, based on these drawings, his paintings from the Düsseldorf years cried out against the social injustice of war. In 1925, Wollheim left the Rhineland for Berlin; this move also marked his emergence from the dynamic exuberance of Expressionism to a more sober study of everyday life. Fleeing the ascent to power of the National Socialists, Wollheim escaped to France in 1933. With the German conquering of France, he was arrested several times and confined in a variety of camps-some hard labor, others internment camps. In 1947, he immigrated to New York, where he died in 1974.
Painted in the middle of the Weimar period, the setting of Untitled (Couple) suggests the interior of a café, the lively sphere where the social boundaries of the new republic were tested. Yet Wollheim's subjects are self-obsorbed and cool--his posing of the couple is purposely theatrical. Against this backdrop, he examines the identity of these figures. The uncertainties about sexuaity in Weimar Berlin were products of a society that enjoyed new freedoms but suffered deep unease. Debilitated and war-shocked, men faced a world of shifting female rights, while homosexual culture, bursting with experimentation, meant the obfuscation of traditional gender distinctions. In his objective treatment of two figures whose sexuality is so deliberately ambiguous, Wollheim calls attention to the playfulness of this period as well as to the masquerade that thinly veiled the pervasive anxieties.
The woman on the right sports the closely cropped, slicked hair, penciled eyebrows, and white face powder fashionable with the neue Frau-the modern woman whose equal rights were at the foreground of the 'Weimar Republic's democratic debate. The style was especially popular among Garçonnes, lesbian women who favored this boyish look. The figure on the left, though seemingly, with sharp jawbone, a man, exemplifies another mode of Weimar lesbian fashion: butch women, known as Bubis, commonly wore fedoras, tuxedos, and penciled mustaches. Attentive to the details of this performance, Wollheim encodes his canvas with signs of gender disguise. The deliberately centralized position of two accessories-the dangling cigarette of the figure on the left, and the purposefully displayed monocle held by the figure on the right- highlights two appendages common to lesbians, both symbols of male sexuality: the cigarette holder, a device for extension; and the monocle, the "one eye" on a dangling string. The monocle functions by another means within the painting: at the center of the composition, it announces the theme of vision and deception. The monocle is a sign of attentiveness, commensurate with the Neue Sachlichkeit mission of objective recording of reality. Yet like the convex mirror at the center of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding portrait, the monocle doubles as an object that both defines and distorts. Together with the spectacles of the tuxedoed figure and the binoculars that dangle from his/her shoulder, the monocle completes a triumvirate of alternative seeing devices. In a painting whose subjects' identities are treated with such ambiguity, the presence of so many lenses calls into question the reliability of a seemingly straightforward viewpoint.
Painted in the middle of the Weimar period, the setting of Untitled (Couple) suggests the interior of a café, the lively sphere where the social boundaries of the new republic were tested. Yet Wollheim's subjects are self-obsorbed and cool--his posing of the couple is purposely theatrical. Against this backdrop, he examines the identity of these figures. The uncertainties about sexuaity in Weimar Berlin were products of a society that enjoyed new freedoms but suffered deep unease. Debilitated and war-shocked, men faced a world of shifting female rights, while homosexual culture, bursting with experimentation, meant the obfuscation of traditional gender distinctions. In his objective treatment of two figures whose sexuality is so deliberately ambiguous, Wollheim calls attention to the playfulness of this period as well as to the masquerade that thinly veiled the pervasive anxieties.
The woman on the right sports the closely cropped, slicked hair, penciled eyebrows, and white face powder fashionable with the neue Frau-the modern woman whose equal rights were at the foreground of the 'Weimar Republic's democratic debate. The style was especially popular among Garçonnes, lesbian women who favored this boyish look. The figure on the left, though seemingly, with sharp jawbone, a man, exemplifies another mode of Weimar lesbian fashion: butch women, known as Bubis, commonly wore fedoras, tuxedos, and penciled mustaches. Attentive to the details of this performance, Wollheim encodes his canvas with signs of gender disguise. The deliberately centralized position of two accessories-the dangling cigarette of the figure on the left, and the purposefully displayed monocle held by the figure on the right- highlights two appendages common to lesbians, both symbols of male sexuality: the cigarette holder, a device for extension; and the monocle, the "one eye" on a dangling string. The monocle functions by another means within the painting: at the center of the composition, it announces the theme of vision and deception. The monocle is a sign of attentiveness, commensurate with the Neue Sachlichkeit mission of objective recording of reality. Yet like the convex mirror at the center of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding portrait, the monocle doubles as an object that both defines and distorts. Together with the spectacles of the tuxedoed figure and the binoculars that dangle from his/her shoulder, the monocle completes a triumvirate of alternative seeing devices. In a painting whose subjects' identities are treated with such ambiguity, the presence of so many lenses calls into question the reliability of a seemingly straightforward viewpoint.
Information may change as a result of ongoing research.