The Return of Wilhelmine Assmann
Most mediumistic artists worked in secret, often marginalized, in self-imposed seclusion or in the private setting of spiritualist séances. They had no ambition to create art, not even to create anything themselves. They saw themselves as instruments of extra-personal forces, of disembodied entities or higher spiritual beings.
Even in the few cases where efforts were made to bring the products of this collaborative creation with another reality to a wider audience, most efforts were crowned with short-lived success at best. Soon the works of art and their earthly originators fell into oblivion. The works disappeared, as did the knowledge about them. Thus, it is often a happy coincidence that allows a mediumistic oeuvre to be rediscovered after many decades. And sometimes they are breathtaking rediscoveries, which we see in a completely different way than was possible during the artist's lifetime.
In the early years of the 20th century, a mediumistic artist from Germany quickly achieved international fame and captured the imagination of avant-garde artists: Wilhelmine Assmann (1862-after 1931).[1] But her works also suffered the fate of so many spiritual artists. They were forgotten. Until a few years ago, all of her works were considered lost. Some years ago, a tip from the Halle (Saale) artist Annegret Kubiak led me to ten of her paintings that had survived in Assmann's hometown of Halle (Saale), and eventually I was able to acquire them for the CoMA.
Wilhelmine Hille was born in 1862 in a Saxon village, the daughter of a miner. She was a sensitive, fearful, introverted child who preferred to retreat into the woods alone to dream. She felt constantly surrounded by threatening, invisible human and animal beings. Wilhelmine received only a basic education and worked first as a maid and then as a cloakroom attendant at the municipal theater in Halle (Saale). In 1894 she married Wilhelm Assmann (1869-1927), the owner of a dye factory and chemical laundry. In 1896, their only son, Albert, died when he was less than a year old. Shortly thereafter, one of Wilhelmine's sisters also died, and she became severely depressed. Her anxiety increased, she suffered from malaise and frequent fainting spells, and she complained more and more of unbearable headaches. She was hardly able to go about her daily life.
Wilhelmine's husband sought solace for his wife in various religious groups, Apostolics, Baptists, the Salvation Army, but nothing seemed to bring her relief. Finally, she felt at home in a Spiritualist circle, and it soon became apparent that she herself had mediumistic abilities, receiving messages through automatic writing. This activity calmed her. In the group she met the Russian student Ilya Mikhailovich Eppstein, who had noticed that Wilhelmine often drew arabesque-like decorations at the end of her messages. He suggested that she ask her control spirit, Helize, who claimed to be a Russian Jew who had died young in Siberia, what this meant. Helize wanted to draw. This frightened Wilhelmine because she had never drawn and had no talent, desire or even ambition to do so. The student suggested that she get some colored pencils.
As soon as Wilhelmine placed the crayons and paper in front of her, Helize began to draw through her medium. At first, she created strange webs of lines that awkwardly formed into flowers or plant-like shapes. This was in August 1904, when Wilhelmine Assmann was 42 years old. It did not take long for the drawings to become more complex. Their creation followed a peculiar process. Wilhelmine usually got up in the middle of the night to give in to the impulse to draw that she could not resist. She began her drawings with outlines in pencil along the edges of the sheet of paper, then a diagonal line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner, and a few sweeping lines that were like a hint of an outline. Then she continued to draw with the colored pencils. As she drew, Wilhelmine Assmann saw a glowing hand above her own, guiding her. She placed lines, dots, small circles and ovals, worked on surfaces with short strokes or a kind of hatching, filling the page with colorful biomorphic forms, free from aesthetic constraints and rules, except for following the diagonal division in her composition. She would draw for hours in this trance-like state, automatically reaching for the pencils and creating whatever her hand wanted to create. Although she spent many hours at night drawing at her desk, she felt refreshed, happy, and almost healthy afterwards. Her working method was always meticulous, and it took her 50 to 100 hours to complete a drawing. Once she started a drawing, she would take it up again in the next nightly session until it was finished.
Word of the phenomenon spread in Spiritualist circles, articles appeared in Spiritualist magazines, and Wilhelmine Assmann began to show her drawings in public. The first positive statements from well-known artists and scientists became known. These included the Munich genre painter Eduard von Grützner and Rudolf Rücklin, the director of the goldsmith school in Pforzheim. In 1907, Oswald Mutze, a specialist publisher of spiritualist and occult literature, and the Graphische Kunstanstalt Dr. Trenkler & Co, a specialist in the production of picture postcards, published two series of six postcards with her works in Leipzig.
After that everything happened very fast. In 1908 she had several exhibitions in major German cities, and in 1909 she had highly acclaimed exhibitions in Belgium and the Netherlands. In Belgium, the Symbolist painter Jean Delville, who had a strong interest in occult, esoteric and theosophical ideas, saw Assmann's works and spoke enthusiastically about them. His testimony cannot deny the theosophical point of view. Delville spoke of the "absolute originality" of the works, which depicted the invisible nature and revealed the artist's connection "with the realities of the astral and mental planes.”What was exciting and quite new and unusual for mediumistic drawings was that Assmann's works were not only shown in makeshift exhibition spaces in club rooms, hotels, and cafes, away from the institutions reserved for "real" art, such as galleries and museums. Rather, the drawings were also hung in prestigious and even progressive galleries. As early as 1908, for example, they were exhibited at the Kunstsalon Banger in Wiesbaden, which was considered a progressive gallery at the time. A year later, in June 1909, the Kunstsalon Emil Richter in Dresden hosted the third and much-publicized exhibition of the artists' group Die Brücke, one of the most important expressionist associations and now considered a pioneer of classical modernism. Works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were exhibited in the main room of the Richter Gallery. The works of Wilhelmine Assmann were shown in the adjoining room. It was there that the neurologist Heinrich Stadelmann saw her works. Stadelmann not only practiced psychotherapy in his private clinic in Dresden, but also maintained close friendships with the artists of Die Brücke. Stadelmann's psychological opinion on Wilhelmine Assmann has survived.[3] He observed in her the lifting of an inhibition through conscious thoughts in a self-hypnotic state, whereby "in the depths of the richness of the soul" innumerable spiritual images could come to the surface. And he adds: "Certainly the revelations of her spirit lie beyond the everyday and the average, as is the case with all art".
When an exhibition of Wilhelmine Assmann's work was held in Berlin at the turn of the year 1908/1909, the American philosopher and psychologist James Hyslop took the opportunity to interview Wilhelmine Assmann. At that time, Hyslop had already devoted himself exclusively to the study of psychical research and had restructured the American Society for Psychical Research in 1906. His detailed report in the New York Times on January 17, 1909, made Wilhelmine Assmann known overseas.[4]
At the beginning of the 20th century, a new kind of entertainment industry was already in full swing. Sensations, the rare, the exotic, and the outlandish sold well. Performances with occult content were especially popular. Wilhelmine Assmann catered to this interest. It was not the exhibitions of her drawings that attracted people, but the public séances that she offered in the course of these exhibitions. This was undoubtedly also a way of improving the couple's limited financial resources. Entrance fees were charged for the exhibitions and especially for the séances. From 1909 at the latest, a real impresario, Friedrich Kämpfer, took care of their exhibitions and performances. His focus was less on elite art galleries and more on institutions that were popular with the public.
The Passage-Panoptikum in Berlin was a famous wax museum that also housed ethnographic collections and "offered its visitors many other exhibits, such as anomalies of various kinds," as Friedrich Kämpfer wrote grandiloquently.[5] The museum was always looking for new box office draws. For one month in September 1909, Wilhelmine Assmann and her mediumistic drawings were to be the latest attraction. A huge poster hung at the entrance to the Panoptikum: "The Dream Painter Wilhelmine Assmann: Drawings from the Beyond". The interest exceeded all expectations. Without further ado, the exhibition was extended for another three months, until the end of the year. Especially on Sundays, several thousand visitors came to see the exhibition.
In her previous exhibitions, Assmann had already offered drawing séances on certain days during which the public could observe her work. In Berlin, however, at the Passage-Panoptikum under the influence of the marketing expert Friedrich Kämpfer, this took on alarming proportions. Wilhelmine Assmann performed daily for hours, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 3 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., in front of a sensation-hungry and voyeuristic public that watched her draw.
It is amazing enough that the medium put up with all this. The process of mediumistic drawing, which actually followed an uncontrollable impulse that came over her spontaneously at night in a trance-like state, now had to submit to the rules of the entertainment business. Wilhelmine Assmann did this with composure, and she developed the ability to put herself into an autohypnotic state of extreme concentration in which she was almost completely unaware of what was going on around her. She would draw with a set of colored pencils previously selected by her "spirit friends" in a calm, attentive manner, without interruption, like a machine, for hours until her husband woke her from her state by speaking to her authoritatively. At the next session, she would continue to work on the drawing she had started with the selected crayons. This would continue for many days until a drawing was completed.
Of course, the public drawing sessions and the subsequent interviews with researchers and journalists had an influence on the development of her work. The astonishing inventiveness of the raw, surprising, and novel creations of the early period was followed by works that were more like compositions. Apparently, she had unconsciously internalized certain interpretations and expectations and gradually incorporated them, just as unconsciously, into her drawings. It was repeatedly written that her works were reminiscent of oriental ornaments, abstract patterns on Far Eastern fabrics and carpets, and many interviewers wanted to know why she did not draw any figures, such as animals or people. In the new drawings, the diagonal division that had given the early works an impressive dynamic aspect had disappeared. Now her works mostly followed a pleasing mirror-symmetrical structure with a central ornamental element in the middle. The edges were given frame-like decorations, and animals, mostly birds or butterflies, appeared more frequently. What some saw as an advance in her craft was in fact a gradual loss of original creative expression.
Wilhelmine Assmann's success allowed the couple to give up the laundry business in Halle. They moved to Berlin, where Wilhelmine, dressed in a kimono and surrounded by kinds of Far Eastern, mainly Japanese-looking trinkets, hosted drawing séances in her apartment. Her work continued to fascinate, even prompting Germany's largest crayon and pencil manufacturer, A. W. Faber, to advertise its crayon line with a drawing by Wilhelmine Assmann on the occasion of the company's 150th anniversary in 1911.
That same year, Assmann exhibited again in a prestigious gallery, Otto Schmidt Bertsch's Kunstkabinett in Munich. Munich was the place where the Schwabing Boehème combined a laboratory of world concepts from a bubbling amalgam of avant-garde ideas, new forms of coexistence, feminism, and futurism with occultism, theosophy, and spiritualism. It was here that the theosophical and pagan "Munich Cosmic Circle" such as Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages and Karl Wolfskehl gathered around their guru, the poet Stefan George. One of the most active members of this circle was Karl Wolfskehl. He had apparently seen Wilhelmine Assmann's exhibition and immediately sent a postcard with the motif of one of her paintings to none other than Wassily Kandinsky with the question: "What do you think of this exhibition?"[6] At the time, Kandinsky still had in his drawer his epochal study On the Spiritual in Art, in which he challenged traditional notions of artistic expression and laid the groundwork for abstract art. It was to be published in December of that year.
Unfortunately, we do not know how Kandinsky responded to Wolfskehl's question or what he thought of Assmann's mediumistic works. But perhaps the works of Kandinsky and Wilhelmine Assmann can give us a metaphorical answer to this question, as they enter into a dialogue with each other. Some of Assmann's rediscovered works are currently on view in the exhibition Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (March 16-August 11, 2024). Two more of her works will be shown at the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See in the exhibition Through Other Eyes (March 24 - June 30, 2024). The almost forgotten mediumistic dream painter from Halle thus returns to the public stage where she left it more than a century ago: In the neighborhood of avant-garde art.
[1] Elmar R. Gruber, “Wilhelmine Assmann: Returning to the Stage.” Raw Vision, 118, 2024, 28-33.
[2] „Gutachten des Herrn Jean Delville - Brussels.“ Psychische Studien, 37, 1910, 556-557
[3] Manuscript copy of Heinrich Stadelmann’s expert opinion. Halle City Archive, FA 1521.
[4] James H. Hyslop, “Trance Paintings a Puzzle to Savants: Amazing Talent Developed in a Berlin Washerwoman Attributed to Spiritism.” New York Times, 17 January 1909.
[5] Friedrich Kämpfer, “Die mediumistischen Malereien der Frau Wilhelmine Assmann im Passage-Panoptikum zu Berlin.” Zeitschrift für Spiritismus, 14, 1910, 22-23.
[6] The postcard is in the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation at the Lenbachhaus in Munich.