- Title
- The Sleepwalker
- Date Made
- 1919
- Medium
- Woodcut on brownish simili-Japan paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 10 1/2 x 8 15/16 in. (26.67 x 22.7 cm); Sheet: 14 x 10 3/4 in. (35.56 x 27.31 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.82.287.40
- Collecting Area
- Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies
- Curatorial Notes
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler studied art in Dresden, where she came into contact with the radical Dresden Secession Group, which also included Otto Dix and Conrad Felixmüller. The group’s spiritual utopianism is evident in this print of a dreaming figure reaching beyond the earth toward the moon and stars. Lohse-Wächtler was artistically active throughout the 1920s, but suffered a nervous breakdown and in 1932 was institutionalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her work was branded “degenerate” by the Nazis, and in 1940 she was murdered at the Pirna-Sonnenstein psychiatric institution, a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program against the mentally ill.
Exhibition Label: Women’s Work: Art by Women in Germany, 1900–1933, 2021, Erin Maynes.
- Selected Bibliography
Davis, Bruce. German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989; Munich, Germany: Prestel, 1989.
