Navigating Partnership: German Surrealist Ellida Schargo von Alten, Richard Oelze, and Cross-Fertilization in the Visual Arts

The German fiction writer and surrealist artist Ellida Schargo von Alten epitomizes the strong postwar woman, advocating for herself while balancing traditional family and caregiving roles with participation in modernity as an artist and entrepreneur. As a New Woman, independent seamstress, and contributor to the artistic community in Worpswede between 1934 and 1962 and resident of Posteholz between 1962 and 1996, von Alten not only thrived in her own creative and entrepreneurial pursuits but also helped relaunch the postwar career of her second partner, the surrealist painter Richard Oelze. Von Alten's experience as a writer, fashion designer, and pastel artist allowed her to excel within the confluence of domestic responsibility, entrepreneurship, and creativity. This essay explores the artists' automatist studio practices and distinguishes von Alten's methods and abstract motifs from Oelze's to reassess art-historical assertions that artistic influence is gendered along strictly patriarchal lines.

Fig 1.

Ellida Schargo von Alten, In seinem Schatten. 1949. Pastel chalk and charcoal. 29.5 × 42 cm. Von Alten Estate, Herzberg. Photograph: Anna-Lena Heinze and Hans Starosta.

It is tempting to read into Ellida Schargo von Alten's¹ (1911–96) title for the early pastel In seinem Schatten (In his shadow, Fig. 1), which may reference memories of her deceased husband, Erich Schargorodsky, or her collaborative work with her second life partner, Richard Oelze.² The abstract nature of the composition's shallow foreground and cavern-like space refuses interpretation, as is typical of von Alten's drawings and pastel paintings from the 1950s. The illusion of tactile surfaces and abstract textures in the feathery and stippled marks points to the natural world through non-representational means, while alluding to the behavior and feel of textiles. In contrast, Oelze's drawings of the 1950s, such as Abschied, mit dem Schlitten (Departure, with the sled) often make use of uncanny elements to unsettle the viewer.³ Oelze's fantastical creatures, textured with hair or fur, move deeper into a space blanketed in undulating snow. As is typical of Oelze's work from the 1950s to the 1970s, odd heads and disembodied eyes probe through a frieze of closed and tightly controlled marks building up the appearance of knobby surfaces. These two examples, originating from around the time von Alten first met Oelze, suggest the possibility of mutual influence, yet the distinctive hand of each artist remains clear in the handling of open versus closed marks to produce texture and in their use of color, illusion, and space. Von Alten's suggestive title notwithstanding, the comparison of these two artists' work clearly shows independent creative forces with a shared interest in surrealist practice.

As a writer and artist, von Alten is emblematic of a strong woman who managed in hard times. Women in Germany often stitched together a life by selecting their pursuits and combining their efforts to survive the constrained conditions following World War II. In spite of the challenges of single motherhood as a war widow and the challenges of wartime and postwar life, she persisted with her creative ambitions and excelled in fashion design, fiction writing, and pastel painting. She used creativity and management skills to carve out a life amid devastating change, both personally and within broader historical circumstances that affected her directly. Her sensibility for texture and pattern in textile, word, and image joined with her entrepreneurial acumen as an independent business-woman to enable her to craft something new out of disparate aspects of her professional life.

Von Alten's career began in the early 1930s when she opened an autonomous business as a fashion designer and continued in the mid-1930s as she began publishing short stories evoking wonderment in nature and the complexities of a young woman's life in a time of social upheaval. In the late 1940s she began producing charcoal drawings and pastel paintings, a practice that continued into the mid-1970s. From the mid-1950s she served as studio manager for Oelze as she helped him relaunch his surrealist artistic practice. These four aspects of her career—entrepreneurship, writing, visual art, and studio management—often overlapped and blended with each other. Elements of her work in textiles and fiction writing can be found in her pastel paintings, while her experience as an entrepreneur and writer can be felt in her role as Oelze's studio manager. This intertwined aspect of her professional and personal involvements served her aspirations as an artist and writer.

Informed by archival research and interviews with von Alten's family and friends, this article explores the nature of her visual art in relation to surrealist automatist practice and her entrepreneurial activities in light of the benefits and challenges of her partnership with Oelze. Von Alten wrote about the mutual support the two artists gave each other and yet quietly downplayed her contribution to the artistic scene of the 1950s and 1960s in order to avoid competition with Oelze. Ever cognizant of the reception of her work by art critics, von Alten stressed that she was not merely a student of Oelze but also that she learned crucial foundations from him and moved on to develop her own style and artistic methods. Within the productive energy and exchange of ideas in an artist partnership, von Alten's development of a unique visual language in pastel accelerated in the 1960s. At that time she gained public recognition for her automatist drawings and pastels, a visual output resulting from the fruitful combination of her textile work, fiction writing, and image-making practices.

I argue that von Alten's entrepreneurial capabilities spurred her to become her own advocate in wartime and postwar Germany and allowed her to thrive within an artist partnership that served as a catalyst for her creative experimentation as a self-described writer and artist. In spite of and coterminous with her maintenance of a family household and later her management of Oelze's studio, she produced a remarkable output that included numerous short stories, a novel, and more than three hundred pastel paintings and charcoal drawings in a unique visual idiom. She was not a victim buffeted by loss and desperate for companionship; rather she was self-assured and proactive, navigating her path and making a life for herself amid challenging times.

A Neue Frau, Standing Alone: Artistic Partnership in Uncertain Times

Von Alten negotiated the difficult union of modernity and traditional women's roles. As the third daughter in an upper-class family whose landed status was conferred in the mid-nineteenth century, her choice to pursue an independent career as a fashion designer set her apart from conventional life in Hanover. In her twenties she chose strategically to don the appearance of the Neue Frau, replete with sailor's trousers, close-fitting sweaters, a softened masculine haircut (Herrenschnitt) that was popular in the early 1930s, and the requisite cigarette (illustration in Moseman, Textured Interplay 5). All of this, but especially the cigarette, signified her turn away from the traditional and privileged background she emerged from. Indeed, as Barbara Kosta notes, the cigarette is not only a fashionable accouterment pointing to a woman's "liberation, eroticism, self-assertion, progress, and independence," but also signifies her entry into public life: "Along with other newly savored opportunities, a woman with a cigarette in hand entered a domain traditionally enjoyed by men. The cigarette symbolized access to and full membership in the public sphere and modernity" (135). As an independent woman and entrepreneur, von Alten was testing the limits of German culture, which in the early 1930s and especially after 1933 still cast women in domestic roles. Photographs of von Alten as a cigarette-toting Neue Frau announce her refusal to be straitjacketed by the expectations of marriage and motherhood. As Kosta points out, "Those who protested women's smoking snubbed their noses not so much at the stench of tobacco as at modernity and its alleged threat to the family and traditional womanhood" (137). These years of early adulthood set the stage for von Alten; from the time her children were young until the end of her life she maintained a complex interlacing of traditional roles and outspoken modernity. Indeed, von Alten's experience as a mother of two and widowed wife of a writer, as well as working as a writer and artist herself, informed her understanding of the need to be free of encumbrances and distractions, making her an ideal artistic partner and studio manager for Oelze.

This balancing act between modernity and tradition is visible in her beginnings as a fiction writer. Von Alten and her husband, Erich Schargorodsky, had come to Worpswede in the spring of 1936 seeking a community of like-minded progressives and quickly became a fixture among the intellectuals there, a group regarded with suspicion by locals, whose families had worked the obstinate peat landscape for two centuries (Hülbusch 27).⁴ Von Alten maintained contact with the literati community through the war years and into the 1960s. Erich, a German-Jewish journalist and fiction writer, wrote under the pseudonym Görge Spervogel. In their first years in Worpswede (1936–38) the young couple worked side by side to make ends meet. Von Alten managed quotidian affairs while launching her own writing practice and simultaneously made space for Erich to work uninterrupted. Although von Alten began publishing short stories in 1934 and the first print run of her 1941 novel, Kindersommer (Children's summer), sold out immediately, it was income from Erich's writing that kept the family solvent.

Ever savvy in her ability to direct her efforts, von Alten recognized the need to sustain Erich's writing endeavors. In an autobiographical note dated 1978 (Von Alten Estate, Herzberg) she wrote that in the Worpswede years Erich needed her support and so she kept a running tab with the local grocer, tended the children, managed the house, and even hosted literary guests in the middle of the night, all to foster his career. After Erich died on the Eastern Front in 1942, von Alten wrote short stories to help her young children cope with the loss of their father while working as a seamstress to make ends meet. Balancing the roles of modern woman with a professional writing practice on the one hand and traditional housewife on the other set up a pattern that her partnership with Oelze later followed. Although Oelze and von Alten never married, the very origins of their friendship were in her simultaneous caregiving and creative output, following the balance of modernity and tradition that von Alten had established with Erich. She thrived in the dual role of creative worker and nurturer, as attested by her ability to juggle writing, child rearing, partner tending, entrepreneurship, community ties, and, after the war, a robust pastel-painting practice.

As Ute Frevert observes in her foundational study of women's social situation in Germany, in the immediate postwar years many women who had managed on their own during the war had no desire to return to a patriarchal family structure in which they would be shunted into a subservient role if they remarried. Many war widows preferred to preserve their state widow's pension by partnering with a man in "a form of cohabitation known as Onkelehe— 'uncle marriage'" (263). She continues, "In this way they kept their pension rights and their financial independence, and public opinion had no choice but to at least tolerate this unorthodox behavior" (263–64). Von Alten may have chosen not to remarry for this economic and social reason, even as her friendship with Oelze grew. Her choices framed her existence in keeping with the ideals of modern independent womanhood. This is even more impressive given her traditional upbringing. As Marsha Meskimmon notes, "Having experienced a high-point in the mid-1920s, the economic instability of the start of the Depression led to sharp criticism of women who had transgressed traditional gender roles in favour of independence, whether financial, social or sexual" (168). It was in the context of this wave of backlash that von Alten deliberately aligned herself with the Neue Frau. Furthermore, in the early days of the Third Reich she could have been taking additional risks by resisting the ideal roles the Nazis assigned to women.

Before the onset of the Nazi regime, von Alten frequently visited exhibitions of modern art. In the wake of the war she directed her creative energy into designing sets and making costumes for children's theater. This activity, together with her postwar work mending and sewing as an independent seamstress, would lead her to explore other visual outlets. Freehand drawing was a natural addition to her active creative practice channeled into practical applications. Perhaps in this time of upheaval she needed the freedom of drawing as art for art's sake to release her artistic energy and exercise her intuitive abilities. Thus it is unsurprising that she was inspired by the art exhibitions she saw in Niedersachsen after the war, including one featuring Oelze's artwork in 1949 at Worpswede's Grosse Kunstschau exhibition hall.⁵ The encounter with Oelze's art served as a catalyst in an existing trajectory of creative output, a nuance that allowed her entry into the free arts to be recognized in continuity with her life path rather than as the decontextualized result of a so-called great artist's gravitational pull, as some art critics have implied.

Von Alten did not become involved with Oelze personally until 1954, when she helped him overcome the self-destructive habits of his postwar existential crisis. Tormented by his conscience as a leftist artist drafted into the Nazi military, Oelze had developed a local reputation as a heavy drinker. One evening in 1954 von Alten found him drunken and badly beaten and got him to a barn where he could sober up in safety. She nursed his wounds and had her teenage son bring him daily meals while he recovered. Then she took him in at her residence in Haus Seekamp (now Haus Insel) in Worpswede and provided him companionship at a moment when he sorely needed a friend.⁶ Von Alten's compassion for Oelze's predicament and her admiration for his artistry led her to take on his recovery as a project. In the ensuing years she continued in her role as personal caregiver, providing Oelze with material support and protecting his sensibilities by keeping the demands of daily life at bay so he could work unperturbed. In the security of partnership with von Alten, at last Oelze could flourish.

In 1962, when Haus Seekamp changed ownership, all the residents had to find new accommodations. With the help of friends and family, von Alten arranged for Oelze to move with her to her family's estate at Posteholz near Hameln. There, von Alten increased her duties as Oelze's personal assistant and caregiver, reducing all disturbances so that he could paint and draw according to his night-owl schedule. Her brother Siegfried, who had inherited the estate in 1943, refitted one of the ground-floor accommodations for seasonal vacationers so that Oelze would have a large north-facing window for painting (Elser 79). Von Alten resided in an apartment across the entry hall from Oelze's room, which served double duty as his living quarters and studio space. Soon thereafter the tenants above Oelze moved out. Von Alten seized the opportunity to rent those rooms so Oelze would not have to endure the sound of footsteps on the floorboards above him and to provide storage space for their artwork above her own apartment, which doubled as guest lodging during visits from her children and grandchildren.

Von Alten and Oelze's partnership fulfilled personal needs for both artists as well as offered professional support and creative impetus. As their partnership developed, they appeared at social venues associated with Worpswede's avant-garde and visited local and regional exhibitions of modern art together (Hattig and Cohrs 6).⁷ They frequented exhibitions across northern Germany and discussed the art they saw. With friends Siegfried and Gescha Poppe they took excursions in the local countryside and to nearby destinations, such as Hamburg and the spa resort Bad Pyrmont. They also ventured further afield to visit von Alten's family. Oelze developed a close relationship with her family over the years, especially her son Till and his family. Scores of photographs from the 1960s and 1970s record von Alten and Oelze at ease with each other, laughing and enjoying the company of friends and family. Recurring photos of Oelze smiling and joking around run counter to popular accounts that insist on identifying him as a gloomy recluse.⁸ Indeed von Alten's family fondly remembers Oelze's wry sense of humor and pleasure in the unexpected. Oelze and Till's eldest daughter, Nina, would play with a stuffed kitten, and he wrote postcards to her between family visits. As his favorite, she was the only child allowed to enter his chamber with the announcement that lunch was ready. With Nina's youngest sister, Svea, Oelze maintained a running game of fascination as he magically made a cotton puff move across the table without touching it. These silly moments and children's games reveal a very different side of Oelze's personality, a side that flourished in the security of his partnership with von Alten.

Cross-Fertilization and Visual Intertwining within Surrealist Practice

The period of partnership was the most productive time for both von Alten and Oelze, especially the 1950s to 1960s. This was a time of stabilizing and experimentation for each of them. The intellectual stimulus they provided each other supported their mutual need for companionship and ignited their creative energies. An avid reader, she regularly sought fresh reading material for herself and screened readings of potential interest to Oelze, knowing what kinds of literature would suit his taste. By her own account, corroborated by family narratives, the two artists discussed the literature they read as well as current events they learned about through daily radio and TV broadcasts. Their intellectual exchange is evidenced in archival documents attesting to the artists' shared interests in literature, music, and nature. This displays von Alten as a connected, informed, vibrantly alive individual who was strategically framing her activities within the conditions of moment.

For von Alten and Oelze, surrealist practice entailed different visual results based on an array of automatist means. Oelze thrived on creating dreamlike imagery that evokes the uncanny, as in Abschied, mit dem Schlitten. Von Alten also made figural works that modify human or animal forms through Freudian condensation and displacement, but she excelled at creating images of organic abstraction, as in In seinem Schatten (Fig. 1). In these compositions she followed a process-oriented practice not unlike automatic drawing and painting utilized by André Masson and other surrealists in 1920s Paris. She learned about these practices through visits to exhibitions of international modernism in the early 1930s, late 1940s, and early 1950s to late 1960s, as well as through her interactions with Oelze. While von Alten refrained from adding to compositions any non-art materials such as glue and sand that many automatist painters used, she frequently executed works in multiple drawing media, allowing charcoal to add tonality to bright pastel foundations and enhancing enigmatic forms using graphite or ink. This instinctive approach to image making prioritizes the unexpected as it emerges from the mark-making process, allowing von Alten to accentuate these anomalies and features as they appear in the composition. In other words, the process itself gradually reveals the image that becomes a final work of art, a practice based in automatist experiments common in Parisian surrealism prior to 1929.

In addition to a process-driven practice, automatism shaped von Alten and Oelze's shared encounter with each other's art. They engaged in wordplay, much like the surrealists' verbal game of cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) but with less rigid syntactical structure, and extended this shared construction of verbal imagery to their visual imagery, too. Oelze's Wortskizzen (word sketches), preserved in the Richard-Oelze-Archiv in Bremen as Titelnotizen (title notes), include several phrases that von Alten used in her titles, such as Die Frau, die im Schrank wohnt (The woman who lives in the wardrobe), while von Alten's Titelideen (title ideas), preserved in the Von Alten Estate in Herzberg, include many phrases Oelze used for his titles, such as Wenn auch von anderer Schönheit (Although of different beauty). Title lists in both archives are replete with notes in von Alten's handwriting marking some titles as meine (mine) or deine (yours) or with initials. The intimacy of these notations gives light to the intensive working relationship von Alten and Oelze enjoyed. Such collaborative exercises in constructing title phrases extended to their artistic practice, too. Statements von Alten wrote during this period attest that although she and Oelze composed their drawings and paintings independently, they thrived on a shared commitment to art.⁹ For example, she wrote: "In the Posteholz years (after 1962) we always worked together.— There are drawings with Oelze's thoughts that I completed. And drawings that I began and Oelze continued. We mutually supported and encouraged each other.— One can barely speak of mine and yours.— That was our work."¹⁰ Such intertwined practice relates to surrealism's cadavre exquis and was typical of efforts to release rational control over the art-making process.

With Oelze's friendship and their mutual support, von Alten launched her career as a visual artist, which lasted from the late 1940s through 1975. Her material support allowed Oelze to reestablish himself as a productive artist, and he intensified his practice of drawing and painting to respond to the experience of war (Moseman, "Zukunft"). At the same time, von Alten explored new methods of combining charcoal drawing and pastel painting. Her compositions became gestural and textural rather than linear and illusionistic like Oelze's. Owing to her work as a fiction writer and dress designer, von Alten's visual work took on more lyrical effects with a broader range of textural characteristics than Oelze's, and they bear a narrative levity quite different from the uncanny qualities typical of his work in the same years (cf. Schmied; and Damsch-Wiehager).¹¹ Soon after making the break from rendering objects, von Alten changed her focus to abstracted figuration and fully non-objective organic abstraction achieved in affinity with nature, textiles, music, language, and literature, all of which can be seen in the examples discussed below.

By von Alten's own account, Oelze encouraged her artistically and advised her to seek the "inner vision of things" (Hattig and Cohrs 6), an aim that suited her disposition as a writer of fiction and catapulted her into surrealist automatism. Yet von Alten's process-oriented automatism differed from Oelze's motif-oriented approach. A set of examples from von Alten's first and second decades of artistic production display pictorial effects that are distinct from Oelze's methods and motifs. Pastels she made between the late 1940s and early 1960s are characterized by abstract organic forms in a shallow foreground. These are surrounded by indeterminate space that suggests geological or natural forms, as if in a cavern or shallow, rocky landscape. Geological effects can be seen in two pastels from the late 1950s and early 1960s, by which time her studio practice had reached full maturity. The first was a wedding gift for her son and daughter-in-law in 1958 and is referred to by the family as Das Hochzeitsbild (The wedding picture).¹² The second, dated 1961, is titled Merkmale (Features);¹³ it was exhibited in 1963 at the prestigious Grosse Kunstausstellung at Munich's Haus der Kunst. Von Alten described both as "mixed technique" (Mischtechnik)¹⁴ where the bright pastel palette is toned down by skeins of charcoal overlay. This approach allowed her to fine-tune the nuanced textural effect and tonal mood of her compositions. She capitalizes on the soft quality of pastel and charcoal, both of which can be controlled using minimal force to obtain subtle visual effects. This suited von Alten's automatist process of freely building up gestural marks that guide the further development of motifs as they emerged through the process itself. Unlike Oelze's tightly controlled emulation of the appearance of automatism, von Alten engaged in automatist process-based techniques to create her compositions.

In Das Hochzeitsbild, abstract forms rise upward in myriad colors ranging from pale blue to light yellows and greens. The left foreground drops precipitously, opening up a cavernous abyss in front of the main form, behind which undulating fragmented surfaces curve like a cave wall around the back. Stippled charcoal strokes across the pastels create the appearance of a rough, natural texture. Merkmale also features abstract organic forms in the foreground of a shallow, cavern-like space. Here, feathery forms extending upward before a turquoise protrusion are balanced at the right by a stone-like rectangular shape next to a tall, slender object bearing a finial at the top. Deep darkness extends from this finial toward the right while a surface in brown modulated by yellow and green suggests the ceiling of a cave above an undulating gray, pink, and turquoise cavern wall behind. Again a layer of charcoal over the bright pastels adds gravity and mimics a pocked and rough texture.

Compositions exploring these effects continue into the 1960s, when von Alten's practice flourished as she found her stride within the vocabulary of organic abstraction brought about through automatist means. As a result of this visual exploration, and perhaps due to a change of residence, her output increased. Her resolve to work abstractly may have been bolstered by the variety of abstract compositions on display in postwar exhibitions of European and American art. Pre-and postwar European abstraction was included in the 1955 documenta show in Kassel, and the 1959 documenta II show featured American Abstract Expressionism alongside European postwar art. The latter (at which Oelze exhibited), together with the 1958–59 touring exhibition New American Painting, organized by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art and financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which was backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency, strategically showcased American abstraction as connoting freedom in opposition to fascists' nationalist classicism and Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialist realism.¹⁵ The focus of von Alten's abstract work intensified in this climate, after she and Oelze moved to Posteholz to concentrate on the shared goal of producing art. The artworks she created there, dating from the early 1960s to early 1970s, are characterized by rich textural abstraction alluding to the tactile qualities of various textiles and enhanced by subtle coloristic effects evoking nature. She often allowed the black or colored paper to show between open marks along with the continued application of gestural strokes in charcoal over the pastel to further this textural and tonal effect. This is true in Am Jues (On the Jues; cf. Hattig and Cohrs 38), made using pastel on black paper with select areas of charcoal. It offers another approximate chronological point, as the title derives from von Alten and Oelze's visits to Herzberg am Harz once her son and his family moved there in the early 1960s. Skeins of pastel marks typical of von Alten's automatist process build up layers of color intuitively, letting the composition emerge organically through response to successive marks, thus shaping forms that arise from the unconscious.

Fig 2.

Ellida Schargo von Alten, Utensilien. 1963. Charcoal. 45 × 62.3cm. Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Inv. 2013.7.4. Photograph: Gary Huibregtse.

Oelze, on the other hand, was recognized in the 1930s for tapping the unconscious visually by building up images and surface patterns through Old Masters precision brushwork while evoking the uncanny through pictorial form. This can be seen in his most famous painting, Erwartung (Expectation), of 1935–36.¹⁶ His Old Masters approach results in smooth surfaces suggesting imagined scenes with objects that startle through unexpected juxtaposition, similar to the surrealist work of Yves Tanguy or René Magritte. By layering tightly controlled paint strokes, Oelze evokes the appearance of automatist painting and drawing techniques like Max Ernst's frottage, a method for appropriating found textures that spark unconscious associations, or Oscar Domínguez's decalcomania, whereby blotting a viscous medium allows forms to take shape without use of the brush and thus partially circumvents rational control over the painting process. Oelze's deliberate brushwork—emulating effects that other surrealist artists bring about through automatist means—stands as a contradiction and highlights his emphasis on motifs and illusion as a strategy to release the unconscious. Another major difference between Oelze and von Alten is the latter's primary focus on drawing and pastel as her chosen medium, whereas Oelze used drawing as a method to work up a compositional strategy before incorporating it into his paintings. While Oelze signed his finished drawings as works of art in their own right, traditional oil on canvas was his medium of choice. Unlike Oelze, von Alten layered charcoal and pastel on different types of paper to create finished works of art.

Artworks from the years after 1962 attest to von Alten's descriptions of collaborative studio practice. For example, Oelze's untitled work¹⁷ dated circa 1968 bears a remarkable resemblance to the forms in von Alten's 1963 charcoal drawing Utensilien (Utensils, Fig. 2), a work that is highly characteristic of her individual style. Oelze rarely used pastel, but he had begun working in that medium in the 1930s. While some of his later color drawings incorporate pastel, they bear resemblance to von Alten's manner of rendering. This suggests that Oelze in fact also learned from von Alten. Everything in Oelze's untitled 1968 drawing—from the use of pastel to the centralized motif surrounded by deep space anchored at only one corner by the illusion of foreground features—is atypical of Oelze's compositional manner in any period of his career but is absolutely characteristic of von Alten's pictorial structure. The possibility that they executed these pictures together cannot be ruled out, yet art history and art criticism have preferred a tidy division of artistic labor and have been reluctant to acknowledge the kind of collaboration von Alten recorded and which other women artists, such as Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Anni Albers, and Sophie Täuber-Arp, describe as typical of artistic partnership with their husbands (see Pollock, "Art Criticism" 219–23; Müller; Hubert 31–62; Obler).

Another marker of collaboration between von Alten and Oelze is signaled by the prevalence of theatrical effects in their work. The costume shop she ran in Worpswede from the late 1940s through the late 1950s is testament to the inventiveness of her entrepreneurial efforts. Von Alten's work in children's theater during these same years was also well suited to her changed circumstances and likely allowed her to combine her parenting efforts as single mother of school-age children and her creative energy as a designer. Her theater work is threaded into the compositional formats she later used in drawings and pastels, where a shallow, stage-like foreground is accompanied by a frieze beyond the main features, much like a proscenium. She also references theater in her titles, such as Kulisse (Scenery backdrop, ca. 1955), Der Zauberer (The magician, 1967), and Kindertheater (Children's theater, 1964). Could the theatrical space within von Alten's imagery be influenced by Oelze, as the critics claim? Certainly. The earliest paintings by Oelze evincing theater-like space date to 1947–48 and were publicly exhibited in 1952 or later.¹⁸ Yet it is noteworthy that the theatrical quality of Oelze's compositions became more pronounced after his partnership with von Alten began in 1954. Von Alten's work with children's theater could just as easily have motivated him to intensify this articulation of space nascent in his work just prior to their meeting. The idea that von Alten in any way influenced him is anathema in the scholarship on Oelze, and indeed in the structure of art history as a discipline.¹⁹ As Griselda Pollock has noted in relation to artist-partners Sonia Delaunay-Terk and Robert Delaunay, "The issue of lineage, descent and influence constitutes a critical and legitimating aspect of the narrative of modern art. Rarely are women allowed to exercise influence. They are the influenced, learning from the masters but never functioning themselves as the 'master', and never influencing the course of art history or another artist" ("Art Criticism" 221). Perceptions such as these result from patriarchal construction of women artists' identities when aligned with a male artist-partner, as has been the case for von Alten.

Critics' insistence on von Alten's indebtedness to Oelze was a mainstay in the art press of the time. Von Alten was aware of the perception presented in the media that she was merely a student of Oelze, or worse, an imitator. These uninformed commentaries remained de rigueur right up until the end of von Alten's life. In 1991 and again in 1994 she was honored with solo exhibitions. In spite of the clearly distinctive nature of her style discussed above and the predominant choice of pastel as a medium that set her art apart from Oelze's preference for oil painting, reviews of these two solo exhibitions compare her work to Oelze's and repeat the stereotype of the female admirer who becomes a student of the master only to adopt his style, thus falling into the role of copyist. As is still all too common in writing addressing women's cultural production, what little critical reception exists for von Alten frames her in the shadow of Oelze as derivative or influenced by him, a constant drumbeat in modernist art history. The most positive critic recognized a glimmer of something new in her interpretation of Oelze. In his exhibition review, Detleff Wolff notes that even if von Alten's landscapes are like the setting in Oelze's theatrical figural and eye-filled compositions, for her they are the finished composition, which he defines as her unique contribution to the male-dominated field of surrealism.²⁰ The message in this backhanded compliment is that von Alten's work is less accomplished than Oelze's; her art is merely a backdrop compared to his full-fledged compositions.

These stereotypes and repeated criticisms may have motivated von Alten to advocate for herself by writing several statements about the true nature of her artistic partnership with Oelze. In the early 1990s when she established the Richard-Oelze-Archiv at the Kunsthalle Bremen, she included among the papers deposited there a statement written in her own hand attesting to the mutual support and creative impulse they provided for each other: "Oelze showed me how one can achieve something;— he gave me instructions and encouraged me to go further. I learned a lot through him.— Then came good years of working together. One could mutually support each other in many things."²¹ This statement acknowledges the training von Alten gained through her work with Oelze, but it also points to the mature stage in their collaborative partnership when they worked side by side as equals. The critics' tendency to regard her as Oelze's protégée and her work as derivative of his visual language is undeserved, if not unsurprising given the history of patriarchal perceptions of women artists. She also expressed dismay at the frequent mistakes about Oelze repeated in art criticism and exhibition catalogs, and she may have seized the opportunity to frame her own history so that similar mischaracterization of her work and the true nature of her collaboration with Oelze could be shaped directly through her words.

The only critic to date who has taken seriously von Alten's shared practice with Oelze is the arts-and-culture journalist Rainer B. Schossig. At the outset of his 2000 essay about her involvement with Oelze, Schossig represents von Alten's combined roles of culturally attuned life partner, housewife, caregiver, estate manager, and artist colleague (64). He acknowledges the sensitive, even sensual eye von Alten had for Oelze the man and artist as inferred from her many writings about him and his own 1996 interview with her.²² He describes her as Oelze's bridge to reality and posthumous public defender and acknowledges her role in revealing and perhaps even constructing the character of Oelze for public consumption as early as 1960. Schossig notes that because Oelze himself was sparing in his words and writings, we have von Alten to thank for the minute description of his living conditions and habits that affected his painting and drawing practice after the war (65). In the course of the interview, Schossig asks, "Who then is dependent on whom?" and "Who then helped whom?" to challenge our assumption that Oelze was the stronger personality who influenced a naive budding artist of the presumed weaker sex. The nature and direction of von Alten's statements in the interview makes it clear that she was gently guiding the journalist away from making the same mistakes as previous writers who had ignored her role in fostering Oelze's success. My inquiry takes up this challenge to reveal the quality of von Alten's surrealist practice and the specific ways that she supported Oelze's artistry.

Schossig and I both acknowledge that von Alten had an impact on Oelze's artistic development after their first interaction in the mid-1950s. We both recognize the deliberate character of von Alten's shaping of Oelze's biography from the close proximity of her position as his helpmate and artistic equal within the "symbiotic closeness of their relationship" (Schossig 67). My art-historical approach to von Alten differs from Schossig's, however, in the contextual framing I offer, which situates von Alten's art within the full spectrum of her creative and entrepreneurial endeavors as well as accounting for the forces at play that make her advocacy for herself as an independent woman stand out as exemplary of the times in which she lived and worked. I would note, furthermore, that the interview transcript reveals her decisive role in fostering the move toward abstraction in Oelze's postwar paintings and drawings. Von Alten's statements in the interview shine a light on the mutual path that the two artists forged in the 1950s moving away from symbolic figuration and toward greater abstraction (Schossig 67).

Fashioning a Life: Studio Management and Art-Historical Paradigms

By the late 1950s von Alten had already started procuring art supplies for Oelze and assisting with gallery and exhibition correspondence, effectively managing his studio while launching her own career as a visual artist.²³ In this capacity she maintained relationships with painting suppliers and frame shops in Worpswede and Hameln and kept the household stocked with artistic implements. After they moved to Posteholz, she would take a taxi into Hameln to acquire supplies, transport artworks to exhibitions, and post letters in nearby Aerzen. Von Alten kept meticulous records, conditioned by a long-standing family tradition never to throw away anything. Her archive of records allows for a clear view of her management of Oelze's exhibition transactions until the end of his life and beyond. She managed the sale of his art, maintained communication with gallery owners, and negotiated agreements with them on Oelze's behalf.

Who initiated the exhibition of Oelze's work remains an open question. Was it the artist himself? Or was it von Alten who catapulted him into the public eye? One assumes by default that Oelze initiated the submission of his work to exhibitions, yet given the nature of their artistic partnership, von Alten deserves credit for encouraging Oelze to show his work and for managing his affairs so that his art would have an audience. If it had not been for this compassionately supportive, highly motivated, and independent woman, it is unlikely that there would have been a postwar Oelze to speak of in the art world. She nurtured the conditions necessary for his rejuvenated and sustained painting practice because she saw the quality of his work and perceived that he needed the right conditions to continue making art. Through her entrepreneurial acumen she was instrumental in securing a public for him. Clearly, he was not the one securing exhibition possibilities for her.

Indeed, von Alten's skill in managing Oelze's artistic affairs and her background as a writer honed her ability to advocate for herself and her art. Having already achieved acclaim in the 1940s for her writing, in the 1960s she began receiving public recognition for her visual work through exhibitions and sales. From 1960 to 1967 she regularly participated in group exhibitions, including the Kunstverein Hannover (1960–64), the Grosse Kunstausstellung, Neue Gruppe in Munich (1961–66), the Westdeutscher Künstlerbund in Hagen (1963), the Kunstverein Hameln (1965), and the surrealist exhibition ars phantastica in Nuremberg (1967). The volume of this exhibition activity signals not only her ability to advocate for herself but also jurors' and exhibition committees' regard for the quality of her organic abstractions. She also sold her work, with the city of Stade purchasing a picture in 1961, followed by the city of Hanover in 1964 and the Wolfsburg Museum in 1965 (Hattig and Cohrs 7). Her success as a writer was now matched by her breakthrough in the male-dominated field of postwar abstraction.

Just as von Alten's success as a visual artist was secured and her career was taking flight, Oelze took a turn for the worse. By 1970 his ongoing anxiety and extreme sensitivity to stimulus, likely resulting from the war, had gradually increased. He made his last painting in 1970 and his last drawing in 1972. Although von Alten's role as studio manager diminished, she soon found herself tending him around the clock. By 1975 she ceased drawing and pastel painting, unable to make time for her art while caring for an ailing partner. In the 1970s she played a prominent role representing Oelze at awards ceremonies honoring his life's work, as he could not tolerate the stimulation of crowds and travel.²⁴ When Oelze died, in 1980, von Alten continued managing his affairs and shepherding sales by gallerists. She took the initiative of sorting his papers to establish an archive of his documents, and negotiated with the Kunsthalle in Bremen as the host institution. She arranged a gift to the Kunsthalle of a set of his paintings, drawings, and sketches, accompanied by long-term loans, with the agreement that the museum would represent Oelze in perpetuity within its exhibitions. From the early 1980s she facilitated Wieland Schmied's research for a major traveling retrospective of Oelze's art that opened in 1987, and she contributed important biographical writings to the catalog. She also served as a cornerstone for Renate Damsch-Wiehager's dissertation research on Oelze, which resulted in a 1989 monograph about his work that featured a catalogue raisonné based on von Alten's corrective notes to Schmied's 1987 catalog. Von Alten also wrote extensively during these years to correct the misperception of Oelze as dark, brooding, and moody.

Managing Oelze's affairs sharpened von Alten's awareness of the need to craft her own biographical narrative. While rheumatism in her hands and neck prevented von Alten from making new visual art in her later years, she actively expanded her writing career. There are two dozen type-scripts for short stories written after the war, one of which, "Der lebende Fisch" (The live fish), was published in 1983. Archival documents from these years also reveal her work on an unpublished collection of short stories. Also around this time she created an archive of her own documents for the Barkenhoff-Stiftung in Worpswede, including copies of her published short stories, photographs, her tailoring business cards and correspondence, mementos placing her within Worpswede's avant-garde, and two unpublished biographical narratives about her family history and life with her husband, Erich.²⁵ She organized two solo exhibitions of her own work in 1991 and 1994. The first was hosted at the Arche-Galerie in Hameln and the second was held at Galerie Cohrs-Zirus in Worpswede. The latter was accompanied by a catalog for which she wrote a set of surrealist texts ("Prosastücke"). This catalog also featured a detailed autobiographical timeline ("Biographie" 5–7), typescripts of which indicate that she was carefully managing the telling of her own story. An exchange of letters in 1991 with Hans-Joachim Trippler, accompanied by von Alten's handwritten corrections on drafts of his opening-night guest lecture for her first solo exhibition, clearly displays her participation in the shaping of her public reception.²⁶ Interviews with gallery owner Wilfried Cohrs reveal her close involvement in the selection of artworks included in the 1994 exhibition. Meanwhile, she began indexing her artworks with her daughter Göntje, who had studied art history in Philadelphia, intending to create a catalogue raisonné of her pastels and drawings. This project and plans for a book of short stories were interrupted by von Alten's death in 1996, but the present essay and related monograph pick up where the planned publications left off to shed light on the interwoven nature of her textile work, fiction writing, and visual art.

The history of art is replete with examples of artistic couples wherein the male partner is better known, or the only one known, in the art world. Some women artists in heterosexual partnerships in the modern era have achieved recognition. In her study of surrealist women in partnerships, Renée Riese Hubert observed that surrealist women such as Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Frida Kahlo,²⁷ and others often depended on association with male friends and companions to succeed in a male-dominated art world, yet women often remained the "silent partner" (6).²⁸ Similar hurdles were faced by scores of twentieth-century women artists, such as Sophie Täuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Anni Albers, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. As with any artist, the success of these women in breaking into popular consciousness is predicated on their specific circumstances. In the case of women active in Germany in the twentieth century, most have made a name for themselves against the odds of patriarchal capitalism and amid family responsibilities. Artists such as Hannah Höch and Jeanne Mammen worked outside the confines of traditional marriage with its expectations of conventional activities for wives, which often did not include artistic engagement. Others, as Meskimmon discusses in We Weren't Modern Enough, have juggled the responsibilities of family life and artistic activity to varying degrees of success. Much like von Alten, many of these women artists were successful in their own right and yet were overshadowed in the art-historical narrative by their male partners, whose artistic affairs they often managed, hence assisting to create the very conditions the art world used to justify their obscurity. In serving as helpmate, studio manager, and personal manager, these women commonly sacrificed their own art practice to protect their male partners so they could work unencumbered by practical concerns. Working in the orbit of strong personalities who were publicly renowned (male) artists meant that these women were afforded at best secondary status in the art world and were written off as wives and girlfriends.

Feminist art history has been calling for a paradigm shift for decades. From Linda Nochlin's 1971 exposure of the structural conditions that prevented women from attaining recognition as artists; to Griselda Pollock's 1988 targeting of the capitalist conditions of patriarchy that maintain entrenched structures and attitudes in the art world ("Feminist Interventions"); to Adrian Piper's 1990 demand to correct art criticism's triple negation of the "colored woman artist" which bars equal access to exhibitions and collectors; to Amelia Jones's 1994 exposure of the blind spots of mainstream postmodernism that codifies certain strains of feminist art practice to the exclusion of others; to Maura Reilly's 2007 reassessment of plurality in transnational global feminisms—the demands for a paradigm shift have been many. In the past decade there have been attempts to right the ship and make space for the diverse range of women artists' experiences of themselves as creative agents and their recognition as players in the art world, yet art history as a discipline has been slow to absorb these lessons from feminist insight. I assert that von Alten's active agency in combining and framing the diverse components of her creative path offers another mode of artistic life that must be accounted for within mainstream art history. Ultimately, von Alten's managerial roles and the compromised perception of women artists in 1960s Germany, when she was at the height of her creative output, contributed to her obscurity. Can art history make space for women artists as inventive producers of cultural capital within their own studio output, as well as through their unsung role as the managerial brains behind famous artists?

Von Alten's place in the art world is only now coming to light. Much like other Weimar-era and postwar women, she balanced her roles as wife, mother, and partner against her activity as writer and artist. Her ability to shape the disparate elements of her own life organically prepared her to take on the role of managing the daily affairs of an artist who needed someone to take care of him and create an environment conducive to making art. Doubtless von Alten's partnership with Oelze bolstered her resolve as a visual artist working in a process-driven enterprise of organic abstraction at a time when abstract art was being championed in the West as free. Yet the implications of a shared artistic practice need to be explored in relation to Oelze's productivity; his postwar success—from winning high-profile prizes to representing Germany at the 1968 Venice Biennale—is attributable at some level to von Alten's material support and entrepreneurial acumen. Their mutually beneficial partnership epitomizes the 1946 statement by Oelze's friend and fellow surrealist Max Ernst: "Art is not produced by one artist, but by several. It is to a great degree a product of their exchange of ideas one with another" (quoted in Klar 6). It is time to reassess Oelze's work in light of cross-pollination in a shared practice with von Alten.