Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art

Although her name might not immediately ring a bell, artist and art collector Nell Walden (born Nelly Roslund) can be considered a key figure in the German Expressionist movement and most notably in and around Der Sturm. Together with Herwarth Walden – whom she married in  – she played a crucial role in building an international reputation for Der Sturm. Still, she was repeatedly pushed to the margins of traditional art history, which has resulted in the fact that most of us have no actual recollection of her today. The unfair fate that befell her was shared by many other female artists of the historical avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century. It is only recently that artists such as Hannah Höch, Emmy Hennings, and Claude Cahun were taken seriously as professional artists and consequently were accepted as pioneers. Before this crucial change of perception, these and many other artists were at best seen as talented amateurs or sexually available muses to their male avant-garde colleagues. They were driven to the periphery of their respective movements, silenced, and eventually forgotten. Associate Professor in Art history at Stockholm University Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe is the very first to expose but also to denounce the problematic reception of Nell Walden through art history. She points out that Nell Walden was largely overshadowed by the achievements of male genius Herwarth Walden, who founded Der Sturm in . Indeed, Nell Walden called him a “forerunner and pioneer of the new art” while others, for example the Expressionist poet August Stramm went even further and considered him as the true personification of Der Sturm (“Der Sturm is Herwarth Walden”). However, heroizing Herwarth Walden highly contributed to the undervaluation of his partner’s visionary role as an art collector, artist, manager, and (later) archivist of the Der Sturm. Surviving promotional pictures of the Walden couple – surrounded by an impressive art collection – demonstrate that Nell Walden played at least an equally important role. Moreover, often-overlooked source material of this kind exposes the many cracks in the existing Sturm historiographies: an undervaluation of aspects as collaboration and supportive labour as well as a neglect of the effective practice of self-presentation (and hence self-promotion) through photographs. Practices in which Nell Walden certainly had excelled. Skrubbe’s feminist reading finally re-positions, or rather re-centers Nell Walden as one of the driving forces behind Der Sturm. She presents to the reader an exhaustive study of the life and work of Nell Walden that is in line with ongoing feminist practices of denouncing the silence around many female pioneers of the historical avantgardes. In this field of research, it is agreed upon today that rewriting these pioneers back into art history by means of biographies and historical revisions simply does not suffice. As such, a growing attention for