Maria Slavona, born Marie Dorette Caroline Schorer (14 March 1865,

Lübeck Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (german: Hansestadt Lübeck), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the state ...

- 10 May 1931,

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

) was a German impressionist painter.

Life

Her father, , was a pharmacist and politician who was known for his campaign to improve the quality of Lübeck's drinking water. Her oldest sister,

Cornelia Schorer Cornelia Bernhardine Johanna Schorer (12 July 1863, in Lübeck – 9 January 1939, in Potsdam) was a German physician. As one of the first women in Germany to study medicine, she became the first female doctor in Lübeck. Most of her professional ...

, became one of the first female doctors in Germany. At the age of seventeen, after some informal lessons in painting and drawing, she went to Berlin to study at a private art school before moving on to the teaching institute at the Museum of Decorative Arts, which she attended until 1886. The following year, she began studies at the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen, an art school for women, where they were allowed to study anatomy and draw from live models. The official Prussian Academy of Art was still a male-only institution at that time. In 1888, she moved to Munich, taking private lessons from the portrait painter Alois Erdtelt, then attending the Women's Academy, where her most influential teacher was Ludwig von Herterich, who introduced her to impressionism. Later, on a holiday back home, she met some Scandinavian artists and travelled to Paris with them but, except for the

Louvre The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is the world's most-visited museum, and an historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the ''Mona Lisa'' and the ''Venus de Milo''. A central l ...

, was rather disappointed.Margrit Bröhan: Maria Slavona. In: ''Das Verborgene Museum. Teil I: Dokumentation der Kunst von Frauen in Berliner öffentlichen Sammlungen''. Berlin 1987, .

First successes

One of her companions on the trip was the Danish painter Vilhelm Petersen and, as they became closer friends, they both decided to take assumed names for their artworks. He chose Willy Gretor and she became Maria Slavona. They also had an illegitimate daughter who later became an actress under the name , after the man her mother married in 1900, the Swiss art dealer Otto Ackermann (1871-1963). Slavona's first exhibit came in 1893 at the ''Salon de Champ-de-Mars'' of the

Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (SNBA; ; en, National Society of Fine Arts) was the term under which two groups of French artists united, the first for some exhibitions in the early 1860s, the second since 1890 for annual exhibitions. 1862 Es ...

, ironically under the male pseudonym "Carl-Maria Plavona". In 1901, she joined the

Berlin Secession The Berlin Secession was an art movement established in Germany on May 2, 1898. Formed in reaction to the Association of Berlin Artists, and the restrictions on contemporary art imposed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, 65 artists "seceded," demonstrating ag ...

, returned to Lübeck in 1906 and came back to Berlin in 1909. HL Damals - Slavona - Tauwetter bei Lübeck

Near the end of the 1920s, her health began to deteriorate and, having failed to find a cure with traditional medicine, turned to

anthroposophy Anthroposophy is a spiritualist movement founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Follower ...

and

naturopathy Naturopathy, or naturopathic medicine, is a form of alternative medicine. A wide array of pseudoscientific practices branded as "natural", "non-invasive", or promoting "self-healing" are employed by its practitioners, who are known as natur ...

. Her health never improved, however, and her last years were spent painting flowers and landscapes in the vicinity of her home near Münsing. Her work was forgotten for many years, having been branded as "

Entartete Kunst Degenerate art (german: Entartete Kunst was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, ...

" (Degenerate Art) in 1933. During World War II, many of her paintings were destroyed, either intentionally or as a result of the war. It wasn't until 1981 that a significant retrospective was held by the

Bröhan Museum The Bröhan Museum is a Berlin state museum for Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Functionalism, located in Berlin's Charlottenburg district. The Museum is named after its founder, entrepreneur and art collector Karl. H. Bröhan (1921–2000), who do ...

in Berlin.

References

External links

ArtNet: More works by Slavona

Unser Lübeck (8 March 2010)
"Maria Slavona: Lübecker Apothekertochter wird eine berühmte Malerin des deutschen Impressionismus", by Christel Busch * {{DEFAULTSORT:Slavona, Maria 1865 births 1931 deaths German women painters Impressionism 19th-century German painters 20th-century German painters 19th-century German women artists 20th-century German women artists

Life

First successes

References

Further reading

External links