Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair

This is an essay by Davey Davis, a student here at the U. I enjoyed it. It is about this photograph, Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair.

Erich Consemüller’s Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair is couched amid the clamoring struggles of power, expression, and representation that were central to the Weimar years in Germany. The woman’s bland portrait becomes the empty vessel for a host of insecurities and traumas created by the post-World War One experience. From the overt displays of this oppression through the work of Otto Dix to the more subtle accounts of sexism in the Bauhaus, the image of the free, creative woman is subverted and manipulated by the dominant patriarchy’s subconscious insecurities. Throughout the Weimar years the intention remains the same: for men in power to dominate and control women in order to maintain hegemony in the visual world.

The woman in the mask is exemplar of the mythological new woman. She is sexual, thin, slightly androgynous, and stylish. As the new woman, she is supposedly created out of the modernity that was ushered in by World War One, earning freedoms as a producer and consumer in the public realm. With women’s social freedom comes a sexual freedom that is cumulatively unnerving to even the most freethinking of men. Their reactions to the idea of an equal slate of sexual expression ranged from nervously warning to violently prohibiting, from publishing books on modernized sex[i] —with the patriarchal sexual hierarchy firmly in place— to the abhorrent Lustmord images.

Both of these reactions can be read visually through Consemüller’s image, the first through linking sexual stimulation and societal stimulation. One of the aforementioned sexual critics, Axel Eggebrecht, paired the endless stimulation of the modern metropolis and the state of constant sexual stimulation the new woman’s presence created. This sexual jitter in the air was certainly negative and had to be shut off: “The insecurity of the man in relation to the woman has become virtually unbearable.” [ii] Eggebrecht called for a return of old gender roles to desensitize the sexual currents of the metropolis. The discourse of limitation begins here, with the Schlemmer mask neutering and desensitizing the woman in the chair. If she once was the sexualized new woman she has been rebuffed and returned, put in her place. By connecting the over-stimulating city to the new woman, Eggebrecht creates a fallacy where the symptom and cause of distracted modernity is the modern woman; she becomes the scapegoat for a larger pervasive social condition.

The largest social condition of all in the Weimar years was the symptomatic trauma resulting from the First World War. Through a similar complication of gender and society, the traumatized reactions to the war make up the dominant discourse towards woman in the Weimar years. The work of Otto Dix is a clear example of men’s visual interactions and reactions to the condition presented by the new woman in a post-war Germany.[iii] In varying degrees of obscenity Dix’s oeuvre is a collection of sexist violence, through it one can map out manifold ways patriarchal reactions manifest themselves and attack women. In brief, female sexual licentiousness is equated with the violence of war, which brings the violence home and visually transforms it into an escalated battle of the sexes.

This violence is not immediately relevant to the woman in the chair; she is not graphically murdered like the women in Dix’s Lustmord paintings. But the motivations are connected: in literally destroying women through art, men can be seen as Pygmalion burglars of procreative power. As Maria Tatar writes, "the only way to manage the trauma of a military conquest is to transform the manifest tyranny of a "feminine" position (struggle, conquest, and submission) into an experience that emphasizes the procreative advantage of that position.”[iv] This conflation of physical violence with other forms of dominance forebodes the woman in the chair’s situation. It is on the field of creativity that we shall see the most grievous casualties.
The theft and barring of creativity is central to regarding the Consemüller image and the Bauhaus in general. In examining the Bauhaus it becomes apparent that the inscribed misogyny transfers from the overt hyperbole of Dix to a more pernicious situation: institutionalized oppression. Modern woman enrolled in the Bauhaus school in droves as a way of realizing their new opportunities as the acclaimed ‘new woman.’ The school, however, responded by marginalizing or rejecting female students, shunting them into the weaving program or categorically denying women access to the architecture school.[v] Lack of aptitude was used as an argument to hold women back, and oftentimes the students would take it as a personal failure when they were rejected.

The position in which the institution placed creative women is inscribed on the woman in the chair. At first glance she is simply a model, an absurd model with a modern mask on. Like the chair in which she sits she is a depersonalized art object ready to be sent into mass production. Already we encounter issues of sexuality and commodification, the role of the modernized techno-sexual body,[vi] but the ancestry of this pose has an older pedigree. The Consemüller image descends from a long line of portraits; beautiful women whose bodies have been turned into a superficial object to be gazed upon. She is attractive, her smoothly shaded legs and tailored dress are definitely feminine. She is not, however, outrageously sexualized, not a Venus of Urbino nor one of countless nudes in the very same chair[vii] whose image is manipulated by her sexuality. There is something equally pernicious and updated about the Consemüller woman’s treatment. In a classic female nude, painted by men, the subject of the painting is disarmed and subjugated by the painterly craft in a method similar to the procreative theft described earlier. One principal factor is control of the gaze. If the woman’s head is turned from the viewer they are free to look upon her, but she does not have the liberty to assert her identity back. The woman in the chair gazes directly at the camera but ineffectively. Like the sexualized woman before her, she has been disarmed of her gaze, but by a more tangible construct: the depersonalizing Schlemmer mask.

Oskar Schlemmer’s theatre pieces were meant to homogenize and dehumanize their wearer, in an attempt to abstract theater into a geometric or robotic pursuit. His performers are made into dolls by their props, they stand in as symbols for natural humans, cut off from world events.[viii] In order to achieve this effect Schlemmer borrowed from two worlds, primitive simplicity and mechanized homogeny. The mask mimics the European idea of a primitive object, with its simple shapes and exaggerated features. The crude eyes and trapezoid nose could have been lifted off of a tribal mask, but the mask’s smooth metallic construction makes it an industrial object as well. This combination of impressions is imposed on the female wearer and bars her individuality. The woman is both turned into ‘the other’ through the exoticiszing mask, and made into a nobody through its machined anonymity. The primitive, inhuman, staring eyes allude to the deeper fear men reserve for the alternative: an unbridled, sexual, and creative woman. Men react to this concept with repulsion and attraction, erotic interest and punitive subjugation.

Shrouding her face is an act of subjugation, as is a bloody corpse presented by Dix. They both represent the culmination of the male fantasy of control, the violence inherent within them underscoring how infantile these attempts at oppression really are. By controlling the woman’s gaze, the masters also control her agency, or her ability to control her creative output. A close parallel can be seen in the physical institution of architecture, where the gendered spaces of Loos and Le Cobusier again deprive the modern woman of her vision. [ix] In architectural space the simplified and fetishized mask has its counterpart in the masculine treatment of the feminine interior. Beatriz Colomina uses Josephine Baker’s house as an example, where the architects neutralized the occupant by putting her on display in a voyeuristic swimming pool, making her a fetishized and coded object. As an object she has been removed of her interior and has become all surface.[x] The superficial woman does not exist as a creative equal to the man who positioned her so; she turns away from the camera, visionless. This type of discourse puts the advances of the new woman in perspective as her position in the world is still modified and limited by masculine conceptions of visuality and space. These concepts, embodied by the Bauhaus and its masters, physically contain and enshroud the woman.

The masculine institutionalized power of the Bauhaus becomes inscribed on this image through the contrast of what is identifiable and what is not. Regard the name: Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair, by Erich Consemüller. The mask belongs to Schlemmer, the Chair to Breuer, and the photo to Consemüller. All these men's artistic achievements swirl around in perfect recognition, while she remains faceless, nameless, and sightless. The objects have more identity than she does, because they have been vaunted by history. In contrast, her dress belongs to Lis Beyer,[xi] a product of the same school that produced the mask, chair, and photographer. She is given no credit, as her role is antithetical to the myth of male procreation. The woman is blinded, visionless, and objectified, still caught in the control of misogynist visual representation. The focal depth prizes the chair over her features; the mask contains her expression and self-expression. She is simply a commodity to expedite the creative machine for men, to spirit them along like a disempowered muse. She is a faceless cog, a replicable agent of capitalism.

These objects and methods are certainly commodities. The photograph, the specified mask, and the industrial chair: all are objects of reproduction and mass production. Their value is not in their uniqueness or creativity but in their vacuous homogeny. By placing the new woman in such surroundings she certainly is modern, as modern and as disempowered as an assembly line tool. Yet unlike the Breuer chair the model was manipulated into this position through sexual power play. Women are inscribed with the inhuman side of modernity, the machine aesthetic of replicable anonymity.[xii] Dix silenced and dehumanized women through murder, leaving a corpse behind. The Bauhaus’ method of silencing is much more effective, because the viewer is unaware any violence took place. Anonymity goes both ways, however, it is possible to realize her oppression as applicable to all Weimar woman who were marginalized. The image can be recreated as a symbolic portrait of Hannah Hoch, Marianne Brandt, or countless other women artists who have been wrapped up by the masculine hierarchy and have been childishly barred from participating in the creative game. When women cannot participate in the creative, external world, they must not retreat further into the domestic realm and leave the public space unchallenged. That space is not intrinsically masculine, it has just been made masculine, and it can be unmade.

[i] Eric Weitz, “Bodies and Sex, Sexuality and the New Woman” from Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, New Jersey: Princeton, 2007, pg. 310.
[ii] Axel Eggebrecht, “Machen wir uns nichts vor: Ein aufrichtiger Brief,” in Die Fraue von Morgen, pg. 121 from Weitz, Ibid, pg. 311.
[iii] Maria Tatar, Lustmord: sexual murder in Weimar Germany. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.
[iv] Ibid. pg. 81.
[v] Anja Baumhoff, “Woman of the Bauhaus- A Myth of Emancipation” in Bauhaus, Eds. Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005.
[vi] Janet Lungstrum, “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity” in Katharina von Ankum Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, California: UC Press, 1997.
[vii] Karl Hubbuch, Nude in Bauhaus Chair, 1928.
[viii] Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls” in Art Bulletin; Dec2003, Vol. 85 Issue 4, pg. 731.
[ix] Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Beatriz Colomina, Sexuality and Space, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.
[x] Ibid. pg. 94.
[xi] Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls” in Art Bulletin; Dec2003, Vol. 85 Issue 4, pg. 731.
[xii] Ibid. pg. 724-745.