Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (born December 4, 1899, Dresden, Germany—died July 31, 1940, Pirna, Germany) was a German Expressionist artist associated with the Dresden Sezession artist group and known for her paintings of the city’s disenfranchised population. She suffered from mental illness and fell into obscurity after she was murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

Wächtler grew up in a middle-class family. In 1915 she began studying fashion design and graphic art at the Royal School of Applied Arts in Dresden but soon after, to the dismay of her father, changed her focus to painting. About 1917, while studying in Dresden, she met artist Conrad Felixmüller, moved into his apartment, and shared studio space with him for two years. Felixmüller drew her into the bohemian artist circles of Dresden, including the Dresden Sezession group when he founded it in 1919, where she befriended artists such as Otto Griebel and Otto Dix. Wächtler, who had severed ties with her family, pursued an increasingly nonconformist and independent lifestyle; she cut her hair short and began smoking a pipe in public. She painted and drew using a variety of techniques and media—including batik, woodcut, oils, watercolour, and pastels, among others—and modes that ranged from Expressionism to Symbolism to New Objectivity. She sold her batiks and other crafts for nominal sums, barely managing to stay afloat on the income she derived from her art. In 1919 Dix introduced her to singer Kurt Lohse, and the couple married in 1921. She became the primary breadwinner, and the financial burden weighed heavily on the artist and on their relationship.

In 1925 Lohse-Wächtler moved to Hamburg to be with her husband, who had found work there, but the couple separated not long after. The next six years, though filled with financial and emotional struggle, were her most intensely creative and included a number of exhibitions. Her subjects included self-portraits, city and harbour scenes, and portraits of urban working men and women. She joined the Hamburg Sezession (founded 1919) as well as the League of Women Artists and Women Art Friends (founded 1926). Lohse-Wächtler’s health and emotional state began to worsen. In 1929 she suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to the state psychiatric institution in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg for two months. While there she drew portraits of fellow psychiatric patients and titled the series Friedrichsberger Köpfe (1929; Friedrichsberg Heads). They were exhibited soon after her release, prompted enthusiastic interest in her works, and enjoyed critical success. Despite her flourishing career and her affiliation with vibrant artists groups, she remained isolated and impoverished. She frequented Hamburg’s red-light district, where she made portraits of prostitutes and a number of self-portraits. In 1931 she painted her best-known work, Lissy, a three-quarter-length portrait of a blond prostitute gazing confrontationally at the viewer. Some art historians interpret that work as a self-portrait revealing the artist’s identification with the marginalized figures of Hamburg’s underworld.

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Virtually friendless and utterly defeated by homelessness and poverty, she returned to her parents’ house in Dresden in 1931. Her father had her admitted to the psychiatric institution in Arnsdorf, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Lohse-Wächtler continued painting and drawing until 1935. By that time Hitler and the Nazi Party had come to power, and—like other individuals who were mentally ill or otherwise disapproved of—she underwent forced sterilization, one Nazi method of ridding society of “genetic defects.” In 1937 she was labeled a producer of degenerate art, and much of the work she made while a psychiatric patient was confiscated; some was destroyed. Lohse-Wächtler was then transferred to the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre in Pirna, where she was gassed to death under the T4 Program, Hitler’s mass killing of the mentally ill, the physically disabled, and those deemed unworthy of life.

Lohse-Wächtler’s work was rediscovered in the early 1990s, when it was exhibited in Aschaffenburg, Germany, with that of other women artists from the Weimar era—such as Käthe Kollwitz and Gabriele Münter, among others—who had long been neglected. With “Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (1899–1940)—Malerei und Grafik,” a 1999 retrospective exhibition at the Stadtmuseum Dresden, she gained still broader recognition. Her surviving works were held primarily in private and museum collections in Germany. Her life, work, and execution were acknowledged in the memorial to victims of the T4 Program that opened in 2000 at the Sonnenstein location.