Elisabeth Voigt

The biography of Elisabeth Voigt (1893 – 1977 in Leipzig) is a fascinating tale of questionable opportunism, disreputable success, and misalignment with changing political circumstances. Growing up in a well-to-do family, education filled the artist’s childhood, attending a private school in Leipzig (1904-09), another in Philadelphia (1910-11), and finally the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB). From there, Voigt joined an impressive artistic pedigree, studying with Karl Hofer in Berlin (1919-27), receiving the Max Liebermann scholarship (1929), and becoming a protégé of Käthe Kollwitz (1928-33).

Unlike Hofer and Kollwitz, who were defamed and lost their teaching positions, Voigt faired well during the times of National Socialism. For example, she received the Academy’s Rome scholarship (1934-35), the Kunstpreis der Stadt Berlin (1941), and sold Arcadian landscape paintings from visits to Tirol to party collectors. After the war, Voigt became a professor at her alma mater, the HGB (1946-52), where she trained the next generation of artists, including Wolfgang Mattheuer and Werner Tübke. However, because she advocated for formal experimentation in her teaching, she lost the appointment, left the VBK, and was offered a consolatory teaching position at the Institut für Kunsterziehung der Karl-Marx-Universität in Leipzig (1952-58).

Voigt’s Werwolf series (1929-31) is based on Hermann Löns’s similarly titled novel about farmers who violently ward off marauders during the Thirty Years’ War. The book became Nazi folklore and widely read war-mongering propaganda in 1939. Even though these woodblock prints were closely overseen by Käthe Kollwitz – who encouraged Voigt to adopt an expressionistic idiom with bold, white lines in large dark spaces, as opposed to her previous inclination towards the richly detailed style of late gothic prints – the Nazis celebrated them at the 1937 Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Munich. In the 1950s, Voigt returned to the subject of the Thirty Years’ War, though with sharply differing political ends, producing gestural illustrations for Bertolt Brecht’s pacifist screenplay Mother Courage. Voigt’s story is a reminder that all historical precedents and artistic styles acquire drastically differing political resonances over the years.

text: Tobias Rosen