Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler: Letters from the "Sammlung Prinzhorn"
Around 250 drawings, watercolours and prints by Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (1899-1940) became part of the Prinzhorn Collection in 2021. At the same time, the Lohse-Wächtler archive, containing numerous private letters, documents and photos, was added to the holdings. The Prinzhorn Collection is thus the most important research centre for the painter, who can be located between New Objectivity and Expressionism. More than 60 letters and postcards by Lohse-Wächtler are now available on this platform for research purposes. In a second step, the Prinzhorn Collection aims to scientifically evaluate the correspondence in the form of a digital edition. The letters are to be transcribed, edited and annotated in TEI-XML format according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Some of Lohse-Wächtler's letters and postcards contain drawings and watercolours. These are to be catalogued art-historically in the object database heidICON and the work descriptions will be visualised in the edition.
The letters come from the estate of Hubert Wächtler and are mostly addressed to him and his parents, Sidonie and (Gustav) Adolf Wächtler. Only three of the letters preserved in the estate are addressed to outsiders: one letter from 1928 is addressed to the Hamburg Senate Commission for the Care of Art, the other two letters, written in March 1932, shortly before Lohse-Wächt and apparently were not sent, she wrote in the Löbtau Hospital to Lene Müntnzer, who lived in Dresden, and to the Hamburg goldsmith Kät(h)e Bub.
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler took an unconventional path in life early on: At a time when women were still denied access to the academy, she decided to become an artist. At the age of 16, she left her parental home in a dispute with her father and attended the Dresden Royal School of Arts and Crafts from 1915 to 1918, but also took painting and drawing courses at the Dresden Art Academy from 1916 to 1919. She joined the Dresden Secession group in 1919 and was accepted into the circle of friends around Otto Dix, Otto Griebel and Conrad Felixmüller. Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler earned her living with batiks, postcard design and illustration work. In 1921, she married the painter and opera singer Kurt Lohse, with whom she moved to Görlitz in 1922 and then to Hamburg in 1925. However, the marriage was marked by quarrels and the couple separated in 1926. At the beginning of 1929, Lohse-Wächtler suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Friedrichsberg State Hospital in Hamburg. Shortly afterwards, she successfully exhibited a group of "Friedrichsberger Köpfe", portraits of fellow patients and nurses, in a Hamburg "art salon". In the years that followed, she produced many pictures of Hamburg's demimonde milieu and surprisingly unsparing self-portraits, which were also exhibited but hardly ever sold. In 1931, financial hardship forced the artist to return to her parents in Dresden, where she again came into conflict with her father. In 1932, psychological problems led to her admission to the Arnsdorf State Asylum near Dresden. Her husband divorced her in 1935 and shortly afterwards Lohse-Wächtler was forcibly sterilised. In 1940, National Socialist doctors murdered her in the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing centre.
In 1994, the Förderverein Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler e.V. was founded in Hamburg to give the painter a name, a face and a voice in German art history.
From 1988 to 2020, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler's estate was managed by Marianne and Rolf Rosowski, who were awarded the Order of Merit of the Free State of Saxony in 2016 for their efforts to preserve this intellectual and cultural heritage. The acquisition of the estate by the Prinzhorn Collection was financed in part by a generous donation from the Schaller-Nikolich Foundation and in part with the support of private donors.
