Annemarie Schwarzenbach : Ravaged Angel

The British designer Clare Waight Keller scored the biggest fashion triumph of 2018 five months ago when the Duchess of Sussex walked down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in a boat-necked Givenchy wedding dress. No Paris catwalk show, even one that brings city traffic to a standstill on a Sunday evening and scores the starriest front row of the week, could hope to compete.

Waight Keller could very easily have revelled in royal wedding afterglow. After all, any boat-necked Givenchy dress on a sales rail would be a home banker right now. Instead, she used her evening at Paris fashion week to show that her vision and ambition reached far beyond one beautiful wedding dress.

The first twelve models – nine women, three men – on a catwalk weaving through the marbled halls of the Palais de Justice all had almost identical haircuts, a neat ear-grazing schoolboy trim. “The casting was paramount,” said Waight Keller after the show. “I wanted the women and men to be indefinable. Something about that felt relevant – and appealing, actually.” Royal wedding or no royal wedding, Waight Keller is not about to be pigeonholed into fairytale frocks. After all, Audrey Hepburn – muse of Hubert de Givenchy, whose Funny Face wedding dress was a reference for that of the duchess – was rocking a gamine pixie crop back in 1954.

This season’s muse was not Meghan but Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and photographer who became a Berlin celebrity during the Weimar republic. “I was researching silhouettes,” said Waight Keller after the show, “and I came across this spectacular looking woman, whose mother had never insisted on her dressing like a girl, and who as an adult dressed sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman but always in a modest, elegant way.”

The designer was wearing an elegant short-sleeved navy blouse tucked into high-waisted black trousers, firmly belted, with cone-heeled court shoes. It was a quiet take on the look amped up on the catwalk. Those high-waisted trousers were worn with silk blouses, cropped trenchcoats or abbreviated biker jackets. Shimmering silver evening capes brought an otherworldly glory to matt black crepe tailored separates or loose, dark silk gowns.

Waight Keller’s show notes were opaque and telegram-brief. “Silver solidifies”, she wrote, underscoring the purposeful, hard-edged mood that saw models marching past at a frantic pace that deliberately jettisoned all memories of a glide down the isle. Not content with having sparked a trend for feminine bateau necklines earlier this year, this show suggested Waight Keller might be about to make the fashion world go doe-eyed for sharp tailoring, metallic and monochrome. The latest fairytale frock? it’s a tuxedo.

Clare Waight Keller's Givenchy show in Paris shimmers sharply in a tuxedo. By Jess Cartner-Morley. The Guardian, September 30, 2018.

When American novelist Carson McCullers met Swiss author and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach in the summer of 1940, she fell in love – instantly and hard. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said. McCullers wasn’t the only one to become enraptured with Schwarzenbach: German novelist Thomas Mann called her a “ravaged angel”; another writer, Roger Martin du Gard, said she had “the face of an inconsolable angel”; while German photographer Marianne Breslauer, who took numerous photos of Schwarzenbach, likened her to “the Archangel Gabriel standing before Heaven”.

But with the rediscovery in the late 1980s of Schwarzenbach’s body of work – a rich catalogue of journalism and photographs documenting her adventurous farflung travels – she gained new interest for more than just her angelic beauty; she was recognised as a female pioneer and a gay icon. In 2001, there was even a feature film, The Journey to Kafiristan, tracing her 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul in a Ford Deluxe with ethnologist Ella Maillart (‘How far would you go for true love?’ read the tagline).

Born in Zurich on 23rd May 1908, into a wealthy family, Schwarzenbach was always a nonconformist. Her bisexual mother Renée, the daughter of a Swiss general and descendant of the Bismarck family, dressed little Annemarie in boys’ clothes from an early age. She wore men’s clothes for the rest of her life, and was often mistaken for a man, favouring tailored suits, fitted sweaters and collared shirts – a wardrobe that both reflected her conservative background and the bohemian lifestyle she later pursued. She had a taste for haute couture too; while in the throes of a passionate affair with the daughter of the ambassador of Turkey to Persia, she would steal and wear her lover’s gowns.

This year, Schwarzenbach’s incredible style informed Givenchy’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection. The house’s artistic director, Clare Waight Keller, directly referenced images of the “hauntingly handsome writer”, presenting tuxedo jackets, leather motorcycle jackets tucked into army trousers, and elegant gowns that reflected the bias-cut 1930s fashion – and perhaps those stolen frocks. “I was researching silhouettes, and came across this spectacular looking woman, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who dressed sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman but always in a modest, elegant way,” explains Waight Keller. “It spoke to me, as it aligns perfectly with what we’re doing at Givenchy. I find the idea of not being defined by a gender in the way you express yourself through clothes extremely modern. Her sense of freedom in the way she would present herself as a different character from one day to the next is highly inspiring. I also love the message about acceptance and tolerance her story gives: she was at peace with her androgyny, and so many years later, it still inspires people like me to keep on colliding codes.”

Schwarzenbach’s legacy goes beyond fashion. A talented writer, she published her first book in 1931 when she was just 23 and, after a brief stint in Berlin where she enjoyed the last hurrah of the Weimar Republic (according to her friend Ruth Landshoff, “she lived dangerously. She drank too much. She never went to sleep before dawn”), she embarked on a career as a photojournalist. Producing 365 articles and 50 photo-reports for major Swiss, German and American newspapers and magazines in the space of just nine years, she travelled to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Persia, and later Afghanistan, the USA, the Baltic states and Russia, often unaccompanied.

Her personal life was no less frenetic. A committed anti-fascist, she helped her friend Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, finance the literary review Die Sammlung, which published exiled German writers; and she used her diplomatic passport – a by-product of her marriage-of-convenience to the gay French ambassador to Persia, Claude Clarac – to rescue anti-fascists in Austria. But her political commitment resulted in unbearable tensions with her Nazi-sympathising family, culminating in 1934 with her first suicide attempt.

And then there was the matter of her morphine addiction. A user from her early 20s, Schwarzenbach spent much of her life struggling to kick the habit. In fact, that audacious car journey to Afghanistan in 1940 was another failed attempt to clean up; her co-traveller Maillart chronicled the difficult experience in the book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey. That same year, the Manns introduced Schwarzenbach to smitten novelist Carson McCullers. Seventy years later, Suzanne Vega wrote the song Lover, Beloved about McCullers’ unrequited passion: “Everyone wants you, everyone loves you, how can I possibly compete?”

The mounting stress of this doomed affair and the death of Schwarzenbach’s father led to a second suicide bid, this time in New York. She was promptly admitted to a psychiatric ward, diagnosed with schizophrenia and subjected to weeks of barbaric treatment. Schwarzenbach escaped, was hospitalised again and then forced out of the US, winding her way back to Switzerland via Portugal, the Belgian Congo and Morocco. Tragically, once home she suffered a serious head injury from a bicycle accident that resulted in more hospital and more morphine. Her mother Renée refused to allow visitors – even her estranged husband Claude was turned away. Two months later, Schwarzenbach passed away, aged 34.

In a final twisted act, Renée destroyed most of her daughter’s diaries and letters, believing they shamed the family. Thankfully, one of Schwarzenbach’s friends held on to a collection of photographs and writings, and in the process saved Annemarie Schwarzenbach from the mists of obscurity.

Clare Waight Keller on the Angelic Gay Icon That Inspired Givenchy S/S19. By  Ted Stansfield. Another Man  ,  May 1 , 2019.

Last month, at the SS19 womenswear shows, androgyny and ambiguity reigned. Across all four fashion capitals, the boundaries of gender continued to blur; from Gareth Pugh’s voguing ball, to Margiela’s first co-ed runway, Hedi Slimane’s gender-neutral suiting at Céline, and Louis Vuitton’s cast of trans and non-binary models, the season marked a welcome further push towards inclusivity.

At Givenchy, creative director Clare Waight Keller celebrated the androgynous beauty and pioneering spirit of Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (as well as Lou Reed and Nico of the Velvet Underground). Not only did she send a collection made up of high-waisted, masculine trousers, languid silk shirts, and relaxed tailored styles down the runway, she also enlisted a number of models who bore more than a passing resemblance to Schwarzenbach to wear it.

In recent years, Schwarzenbach’s distinctive and mysterious glamour has captured the contemporary queer imagination, given her unique history. Born in Zurich in 1908, her life was one of contradictions: her struggle with physical fragility and opioid addiction co-existed with an adventurous streak and proclivity for global travel, while admirers and detractors have placed her on opposing sides of the artistic rebellion against Hitler in the 1930s.

In terms of style, her presentation was deliberately neither feminine or masculine, and, much like the SS19 Givenchy collection, instead walked the line somewhere in-between. With her short hair and understated wardrobe of slim trousers, neat shirts, and knitted sweaters, her beauty sat in stark contrast to what was deemed glamorous in the 30s and 40s, and she was all the more enigmatic for it. Captivating many who came into contact with her, she had many affairs with women throughout her short life. On a reporting trip to the Pyrenees, fellow photographer Marianne Breslauer took a picture of her, and wrote that “She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel. An archangel.”

But who exactly was Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and what is it about her that so drew her admirers – and the contemporary queer, for whom she is a total pin-up – towards her?

Born Annemarie Minna Renée Schwarzenbach in 1908, Renée Schwarzenbach was raised as a boy near Lake Zurich by her father, who’d made his fortune in the silk industry and her mother, Renée Schwarzenbach-Mille, who descended from German aristocracy and was openly bisexual. Renée carried out an affair with German soprano Emmy Krüger, while also pursuing her passion for horses and photography. Annemarie took after her mother with her passion for adventure and her free-spirited nature, but their relationship was often fraught. Renée’s political loyalty to the reconstruction of Germany under Hitler during World War II, and the Schwarzenbachs’ sympathy for far-right Swiss Fronts, led to the deterioration of the familial bond. Annemarie denounced the fascist regime, moving with a circle that included Jews and political refugees exiled from the troubled country.

Schwarzenbach’s wanderings took her all over the globe. Despite a sensitive constitution, she cultivated a vast travelogue in her short life, and explored the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and America extensively. Having left behind a troubled home life, the photographer and writer moved first to Berlin, where she threw herself into the vibrant, bohemian nightlife and a hedonistic existence of drink and drugs, before marrying French diplomat Achille-Claude Clarac (who was also homosexual) to obtain a French diplomatic passport. The pair settled for a short time in Tehran, before Schwarzenbach left for Kabul, Lisbon, and the Balkans, never staying in one place too long.

“Fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid. But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space and a city with a magical, unreal name… becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath,” she wrote in her 1940 book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey, which documents her trip to Afghanistan with fellow writer Ella Maillart. The previous year, the pair had become the first women to travel the country’s Northern Road, as the fled the storm brewing in Europe in a beaten-up Ford.  

Schwarzenbach’s photographs offer unique insight into her singular vision. Best known, perhaps, for the images she captured of the Hitler Youth in Vienna or her self-portraits, she also extensively documented the people and sites she encountered during her wide travels. For the queer sensibility, it’s photos of Annemarie herself that most enchant though. Slim and pale, with deep-set eyes that seem to simultaneously look at and past the viewer, American novelist Carson McCullers wrote that “she had a face that would haunt me for the rest of my life”. She was often seen wearing a suit and a necktie, always with an unusual air of mystery. It’s likely this that so enchanted her queer admirers then, and continues to do so now. At a time when homosexuality was widely castigated, Schwarzenbach blazed a trail for living freely and unapologetically.

Schwarzenbach struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, both of which deeply impacted her outlook on life and work. Though she eventually died after a tragic bicycle accident in 1942, at just 34, Schwarzenbach’s chronic illnesses defined her life nearly as much as her adventurous spirit. Her trip to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart marked a decisive low in her physical and mental health, following a stint in rehab for a morphine addiction. Her physical fragility and the effect it had on her usual charisma eventually exhausted Maillart, who remarked honestly that she was sick of ‘Christina’ (as she referred to Annemarie) by the end of the journey. Maillart and Schwarzenbach’s progressive ideas about travel and photography also served as covers for the various vulnerabilities of traveling women in that era. They railed against the presumption of women’s physical inferiority via direct writing and photographs as well as their adopted, androgynous style of dress.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s influence is far further-reaching than just the Givenchy catwalk. Dressed by her mother in boys clothing throughout her childhood, she retained a preference for menswear throughout her life, and cultivated a style that still resonates today. Despite the physical tolls of her depression and addiction, Schwarzenbach blazed a path down the middle of more than just the binary between man and woman: she cultivated an intrepid persona, nearly unheard of for women, even as her body and mind presented untoward obstacles. At a time when women are fighting for equality, justice, and increasingly, simply to be heard, Schwarzenbach’s endurance in the name of curiosity and discovery is more than just a reference point – it’s an inspiration.

Revisiting the life of trailblazing queer heroine Annemarie Schwarzenbach. By Alexandra Julienne. Dazed , November 2, 2018. 

It was the summer of 1939, in the last weeks before war would sweep across Europe, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella K. Maillart were embarking on a 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul, Afghanistan, with the goal of curing Schwarzenbach of her morphine addiction.

At first it seemed as if this quixotic plan might be working: As the two women, both journalists and authors, made their way from Switzerland, through Italy and on into Yugoslavia, they stopped at roadside campsites and small village inns, choosing to steer clear of towns and cities where drugs might be available.

Indeed, one night, as they slept under the stars outside Belgrade, they were awakened by the sounds of village men cutting hay. Schwarzenbach, normally frail and intense, “seemed to revive,” Maillart wrote.

But then, further east, in Bulgaria, at a hotel in Sofia, Schwarzenbach had her first slip. She woke up “seedy,” pale and vomiting, Maillart wrote. That she was using drugs again became clear when Maillart discovered “the brittle glass of an empty ampoule” in the bathroom.

The women went on to endure a tense drive into Turkey, barely speaking, until, in Istanbul, Schwarzenbach turned to her friend and asked, “Why do you bother about me?”

“Why do I bother about you? … I don’t know,” Maillart recalled replying. “I can’t say it is because I love you, because I detest you when I see such gifts as yours spoilt as they are.”

The women would make it to Kabul but ultimately fail in their mission: Schwarzenbach fell back into old habits, and Maillart left her in frustration, going on to India and leaving Schwarzenbach in the hands of a pair of French archaeologists.

Schwarzenbach eventually made her way back to Europe by boat, and three years later she died in a bicycle accident in the Swiss mountains. But Maillart, who went on to enjoy a long career as a travel writer, did not forget her. In “The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939,” her account of their journey published in 1947, she would portray her friend as both tragic and transcendent.

And she would recant the declaration she had made in the car.

“I think I loved her profoundly,” she wrote.

Schwarzenbach was an accomplished journalist, novelist and photographer whose work was in many ways overshadowed by the drama of her life.

An heiress, she was born in Zurich on May 23, 1908, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Her mother was the daughter of a general and a descendant of the Bismarck family. Early on, her mother, who was bisexual, dressed Annemarie in boys’ clothes. (Schwarzenbach would enjoy wearing men’s clothes for the rest of her life.)

Her androgynous glamour left a strong impression on the intellectual circles in which she mingled. The novelist Thomas Mann, whose children were close to Schwarzenbach, called her a “ravaged angel.” And the unrequited passion she inspired in the American author Carson McCullers would lead to a Suzanne Vega song, “Lover, Beloved,” written from McCullers’s point of view more than seven decades later. (“Everyone wants you / Everyone loves you / How can I possibly compete?”)

The photographer Marianne Breslauer, who made memorable images of Schwarzenbach, echoed Mann when she said that at first glance Schwarzenbach appeared to be neither man nor woman but “like the Archangel Gabriel.”

Schwarzenbach spent much of her adult life as an addict. She had numerous tumultuous love affairs with women. She had a complicated relationship with her family, who had Nazi sympathies. And she fell out with the Mann family, who thought her anti-fascism efforts were inadequate because she refused to cut ties with her Nazi-supporting relatives. It was an estrangement that hurt her profoundly, in part because she was in love with Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika Mann.

Schwarzenbach attempted suicide twice. After she died of her bicycle accident injuries at 34 on Nov. 15, 1942, in the Swiss town of Sils im Engadin — she had been showing off by riding with no hands — her mother, defying her daughter’s will, destroyed Schwarzenbach’s papers for fear of how they might reflect on the family.

Schwarzenbach’s work — ranging from striking photographs of Hitler youth to novels, from critiques of Swiss neutrality to travelogues from Central Asia — would not be rediscovered in her native Switzerland until the late 1980s, when the country began re-evaluating its World War II history. (Much of her written work is unavailable in English.)

One of her earliest books, “Lyric Novella,” tells the story of a young man from a wealthy family not unlike Schwarzenbach’s who rejects his family’s plans for him in order to pursue his obsession with a nightclub singer. The novel, said the book’s translator, Lucy Renner Jones, is a pitch-perfect portrait of an era in which to be a member of the upper class was to be a slave to family duty.

For all her seeming fragility, Schwarzenbach was adventurous. One of her best-known books, “Death in Persia,” was based on the years she lived in Tehran as a diplomat’s wife (a marriage of convenience; her husband was also gay). During that period she fell in love and had an affair with a Turkish diplomat’s daughter.

On her travels with Maillart from Switzerland to Afghanistan, the two women engaged in high-speed chases with the police in Azerbaijan and ran away from officials near the Iran-Afghanistan border. (Maillart died in her mountain chalet in Switzerland in 1997 and received an obituary in The Times.)

Schwarzenbach also spent time in the United States as a freelance reporter and photographer, traveling in the Deep South and across Pennsylvania, focusing on the mining and steel industries there. Her photographs from those travels reveal a journalist intensely interested in the social dynamics around her.

And though Mann and others saw Schwarzenbach as a beautiful but troubled soul, they may have been buying what she was selling. She knew very well what effect she had on people and cultivated her public persona carefully, according to her great-nephew Alexis Schwarzenbach, a historian who has written a book about her. “That was part of the package,” he said.

In the decades since she was rediscovered, Schwarzenbach has become something of a cult figure in Europe, though just what she represents remains unsettled. To some she was an anti-fascist; to others, her anti-fascism did not go far enough. To some she was an early L.B.G.T. heroine; to others she was remarkable for her refusal to be defined by any gender conventions.

In one of the most famous images of her taken by Breslauer, Schwarzenbach, in her mid-20s, wears a fitted sweater over a collared shirt. Her hair close cropped, she stares straight at the camera. She is unsmiling, her face half obscured by shadow, her expression languorous. It’s a remarkable face, onto which many things can be projected.

Overlooked No More: Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Author, Photographer and ‘Ravaged Angel’. By Alicia P.q. Wittmeyer. The New York Times , October 10, 2018.

Buried in the folds of his-story, Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a widely published lesbian author. Born in 1908, Schwarzenbach died young, at the age of 34. By then, she’d attempted suicide twice, after years of self-harm. Schwarzenbach defied sexist norms. Those ‘norms’ were sexist and damaging then, and they’re still sexist and damaging now.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was haunted by a world that considered her incorrectly female—So why have there been so many attempts to revise her story, recategorize and relabel her, postmortem, only to say the same? It’s not only unethical, it robs lesbians of what few pages we have in the his-story books. If we can be revised after we’re dead, by the very thing we fight against while we’re alive, then what are we fighting for?

Dazed recently reported that Schwarzenbach “was raised as a boy.” This is a prime example of the ways in which things have been taken out of context to perpetuate sexist ideas. There’s been a media push to rebrand Schwarzenbach as ‘on the outskirts of womanhood.’

Although historically, girls were forced to abide by the rigid rules of ‘gender’ (stereotypes designated based on sex), Schwarzenbach’s parents didn’t force her to conform to ‘norms.’ On the contrary… As a child, she sported short hair, and wore comfortable clothes that were (and still are) categorized as ‘boy’s clothes.’ It’s been said that she was raised “like a boy,” not “as a boy.” And in the context of that time period, that statement refers to the stereotypes, roles and freedoms that were only granted to boys.

Until 1987, Schwarzenbach was forgotten. Her great nephew, historian Alexis Schwarzenbach, didn’t know much about her, until he discovered one of her novels on a bookshelf.

“I went to my grandmother and said, ‘I didn’t know grandfather’s sister was a writer’. And she said, ‘yes, she was a writer, and a lesbian and a morphine addict.’ ”—Swiss Info 

The mainstream media’s erasure of the word “lesbian,” is a major point of contention that the lesbian community has expressed, time and time again. In a recent article by The New York Times, about Schwarzenbach, the word “lesbian” is never used… Not even once. The article refers to Schwarzenbach as “gay,” and her husband as “also gay,” and calls Schwarzenbach an “L.B.G.T. heroine.”

By the age of 23, Schwarzenbach published her first novel, which was very well received. In ten years, she published several novels and produced more than 300 articles, and 5,000 photographs from her journeys across the world. Annemarie Schwarzenbach was finally unearthed from his-story, only to be buried in sexism and lesphobia, once again.

Schwarzenbach is one of the many women who’ve been resurrected and popularized in mainstream culture to bolster false narratives. Narratives that not only maintain the regressive idea that there’s a wrong way to be a girl, a wrong way to be a woman, but also further enshrine lesphobia.

Continuing to equate ‘femininity’ with ‘womanhood’ is about as sexist as it gets. And yet, here we are. Women who dare to claw their way out of the man-made box (of roles and expectations), deserve to be celebrated—Not reinvented postmortem, in order to further cement the very stereotypes that put them in that box to begin with.

Though Schwarzenbach’s beauty caught the eye of men and women alike, her ‘androgynous’ style left her vulnerable to regular abuse. She was a trailblazer who defied sexist expectations—But for women who don’t look and behave the way people think a woman “should” look and behave, the price is often high.

Schwarzenbach spent most of her adult life trying to escape. She wrote, took photos, traveled, drank, used drugs, and was known to regularly stay awake till the break of dawn.

She also kept away from her family, one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland. She had major political disagreements with her mother, who was a Nazi sympathizer, known to be domineering. Her mother was bisexual, and her father tolerated his wife’s extramarital affairs with women.

After Schwarzenbach had a brief affair with a German writer, Erika Mann, she settled into the Mann family’s home and became an ‘adopted’ part of their family. She spent a good deal of time hanging out with Erika’s gay brother, Klaus Mann, in Berlin. Schwarzenbach started using drugs and was introduced to morphine.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the Mann family, were vehemently anti-Nazi. Her association with the family caused major conflict with her parents—Especially her mother, who took issue with Schwarzenbach’s circle, which included Jewish people and political refugees.

Like many lesbians (who don’t conform to norms), Schwarzenbach, who was regularly dehumanized, was driven to self-harm. Her addiction haunted her. And in her mid-twenties, she attempted suicide for the first time, after a scandalous affair with the daughter of a Turkish Ambassador. Her family was embarrassed by the suicide attempt, rather than concerned.

Shortly thereafter, she married a French diplomat, Claude Clarac. It was a marriage of convenience that not only provided her with a diplomatic passport (which allowed her to travel freely), but also covered up the fact that they were both gay. But after only five months, she grew restless and left him to travel. Further romantic involvements with women and the resulting persecution, would eventually lead to her downfall.

The persecution she faced, is still alive and well today. “Lesbian” is still a word people hesitate to utter. And the mainstream has continually sanctioned the abuse of ‘butch’ lesbians—Still casting them as unflattering caricatures, no more than a ‘she’s really a man’ punchline. The sexism and lesphobia behind the abuse, is not only a reflection of fragile masculinity, it’s a reflection of how deeply ingrained misogyny is in most people. The resulting cruelty comes with real world consequences.

While the mainstream media has a long history of obsessively trying to expunge ‘masculine’ lesbians from the category of womanhood, ‘androgynous’ women are quite often the epitome of female beauty, the best womankind has to offer.

The media frequently uses an inaccurately translated quote, taken out of context, to push the idea that Schwarzenbach was something other than a woman because of her style—“She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” Revisionists have used this version, of a poetic statement (spoken in admiration, by fellow photographer Marianne Breslauer), to build a new narrative about Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

The sexist notion that girls and women should inherently want to dress and behave a certain way, is encoded in us from the time we are born. It’s in everything around us, from movies, to magazines. It’s the very reason women like Schwarzenbach are being revised and ‘othered,’ postmortem. Many people never realize the depths to which we’ve been universally brainwashed.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was known to be introspective, sensitive and passionate. In her photos, she appears incredibly stylish. Women never needed men to tell us what was sexy—We already knew.

Schwarzenbach tried to run, but no road would ever lead to the escape of her demons. In 1936, she went on a road trip, in the United States, with American photographer Barbara Hamilton-Wright, and documented the industrial regions of the Northeast during the Great Depression. The following year, they went again, and she documented the Deep South. The rift between Schwarzenbach and her family grew.

In 1939, Schwarzenbach tried again to overcome addiction, by going on a road trip with fellow writer, Ella Maillart, from Geneva to Afganistan. Eventually, she got ahold of a morphine substitute and they parted ways. Schwarzenbach then had a love affair with Ella Maillart’s married friend, French archaeologist Ria Hackin, causing such a scandal, she was forbidden to travel in Turkmenistan.

She went back to the United States to work with the Mann siblings, on a committee that helped refugees from Europe. There she met writer Carson McCullers, who reportedly fell head over heels for Schwarzenbach. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” Carson McCullers said.

Let’s take a quick detour here, because McCullers is also among a growing number of women who’ve had their lives revised, postmortem. A writer in The New Yorker, explained her decision to write Carson McCullers as a “man,” in a play and in a movie, stating, “I started to notice that McCullers had issues with her gender…Her given name was Lula, but she took on her middle name, Carson…” I’m not sure what this proves… My friends called me Jay, ages 6-12. In high school, I was called Little Joe. Siri calls me Big Daddy. My current sign out is JD. And I also go by the nickname Romeo.

As further ‘proof,’ the writer goes on to say “[Carson McCullers] wore men’s clothes, and was often photographed in a suit. Her main protagonists were young, boyish girls with men’s names: Frankie and Mick.” I wear ‘men’s clothes.’ I’ve been photographed in a suit. My protagonists have so-called ‘men’s names.’ Check, check, and check.

The writer then concludes that “…had [Carson McCullers] been alive today… she might have been living as a transgender man.” Adding, “She did once tell Capote, ‘I think I was born a boy,’ which doesn’t, in and of itself, mean much—but how many of us, as little girls, have never had that thought? Most.” On the contrary, most of us have had that thought. In fact, my wife and I don’t know any lesbians who didn’t have that experience—It’s a common theme with young lesbians, as we grapple with sexist expectations, limitations and same-sex attraction.

Are all women who break stereotypes going to be up for revision, postmortem? If we’re going on the basis of sexist stereotypes, every lesbian I know could be recategorized after death.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach is summed up in one line, in this same article in The New Yorker: “McCullers was deeply in love with a Swiss journalist, a lesbian drug addict named Annemarie Schwarzenbach.”

“A lesbian drug addict.” The way in which our history is so thoughtlessly mangled and relayed by mainstream media, is appalling. Schwarzenbach, a tortured soul and brilliant icon, was so much more than “a lesbian drug addict.”

Schwarzenbach never became involved with Carson McCullers. At the time, she was involved in a troubled relationship with a married woman, Margot von Opel, and she still had feelings for Erika Mann, who cut her out of her life.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s mental health further declined, and she attempted suicide once again. This landed her in a psychiatric hospital in 1940, where she was held, until 1941. After Schwarzenbach was released, she returned to Switzerland. She then went to the Belgian Congo of Central Africa, after which she took a two month trip to visit Claude Clarac.

On September 7th, in 1942, Annemarie Schwarzenbach fell from her bike, in the Alps of Switzerland, and struck her head. She was in a coma for three days and she woke with amnesia. Her mother wouldn’t permit Claude or any of her friends to see her. She was kept in the family home in Switzerland, where she didn’t recognize anyone, and died nine weeks later, in November of 1942. Her mother set all of her daughter’s letters and diaries on fire, but her published works remain.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach Died Defying Sexist ‘Norms,’ Only to be Redefined, Postmortem, By Sexist ‘Norms’. By Julia Diana Roberston . The Velvet Chronicle,  March 28, 2019.

The Renaissance Nude

When I walked through the doors of The Renaissance Nude exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I did, however, anticipate the same old monolithic discourse as always: white female bodies painted by white men for white people to enjoy.

Of course, analysis of the male gaze and feminist theory weren’t quite a thing in 15th and 16th century Europe, as the exhibition curator Per Rumberg kindly reminds me when I broach the subject of representation. Fair enough. But it also struck me that enlisting two male lead curators to deliver a show on nudity in 2019, felt like a questionable choice.

But let’s go back to what the exhibition is about. When, four years ago, curator Thomas Kren started to work on the original iteration of the exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, he was most concerned with nudity as a challenge to Christianity and perceptions of the body. “Nudity in the Renaissance, especially in this period when it was new, was also about artists having the license to address it in the first place,” explains Rumberg.

As I looked around the room, while nudity wasn’t always flattering, much of what I could see was a fantasised ideal of womanhood. The representation of the female form then was curvy — reminiscent of a pearly, Botticelli-like body — but bigger women never seemed to make the canon and, needless to say, women of colour neither (even though the presence of black Africans in Renaissance Europe has been documented from as early as the mid-15th century.) But as one of three women of colour at the press preview, when discovering Titian’s Aphrodite in Rising From The Sea (Venus Anadyomene) — with her red-golden hair, young plump body, born ethereal and fully formed out of the water — I wondered if it was paintings like these that set the beauty standards of today, and who this enlightened period had left out?

“Italian painters tended to idolise the female form and produce only Venus-like deities,” comments Rumberg. “We can see the reclining nude across the paintings,” he continues, “but depictions of old age were rare yet present in the Renaissance, more so throughout Northern Europe.”

In paintings such as Dieric Bout’s Path To Paradise and Pietro Perugino’s Combat between Love and Chastity, naked bodies were either clothed or subtly draped depending on their verdict. In the latter, it was the duelling forces of libido and restraint, as though sexual desires meant you were a glutton for punishment. On one hand, women were naked and praised for their bodies and on the other, they were naked and punished through their bodies (“a virgin or a whore,” as comedian Hannah Gadsby suitably observed in her Netflix-special Nanette, pointing to the limited roles available to women in art history).

But this seeming openness to nudity in Western art was short-lived. By 1564, the year of Michelangelo’s death, Pope Pius IV ordered that the Italian painter’s naked bodies in his now-iconic fresco The Last Judgement be painted over with drapery — signalling a profound shift in attitudes. “The church thought this was unacceptable,” explains Rumberg. “It was another image of temptation.”

So, what can we learn from the Renaissance nude today, when nudity appears at once omnipresent and yet deeply controlled? From Kim Kardashian’s recent appearance in a revealing Thierry Mugler dress to Tumblr’s nudity ban, are our post-internet, globalised moral values in crisis?

“We can’t forget that at the time, nudity was more controversial because it was set in a very religious, prudent society where being naked was for the private, not the public realm,” says Rumberg. “But it wasn’t just seeing the images that liberated that period, the printing press was new so access to nudity across various mediums also changed.”

Indeed, technological advances often go hand-in-hand with social revolutions, and ours is the advent of the internet. But the digital era has at once reinforced existing canons while also pushing the boundaries of female representation. Body positivity movements have emerged through fourth wave feminism, self-love politics and the freedom to publish what we want for ourselves.

From Chidera Eggerue’s trending hashtag #SaggyBoobsMatter, embracing bosoms that radically contrast with those imagined by Titian, and Universal Standard’s “All of us. As we are.” campaign, reminding us that the ‘ideal body shape’ concerns very few of us. Even Samirah Raheem’s viral video reclaiming the word ‘slut’ demonstrates that although we have more nudity now, we also have a voice to accompany the picture we’re painting of ourselves. Thankfully, that picture is progressively more colourful and queer than the women and men in The Renaissance Nude.

How Renaissance art still shapes our attitude towards nudity today. By Tahmina Begum. Sleek Magazine.  March 4, 2019.

Things look different after #MeToo. And not just after #MeToo, but after several years of a surging fourth wave of feminism. There has been fury against patriarchy – with the term itself, after decades of dormancy, surging back into use to explain everything from the rise of Donald Trump to sexual violence in India to pay inequality in western Europe.

Everywhere, dams of silence and fear are bursting, as women speak out about wrongs committed by men whose powerful positions once rendered them unassailable. Women have also rewritten the private stories they have told themselves (or buried) about their lives, from family relationships to workplace troubles to sexual encounters. In this atmosphere of revisionism, new stories have been needed. Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person, published at the end of 2017 in the New Yorker, owed its viral success to a wave of recognition from female readers. It told a story about dating and sex that seemed intensely true but, till then, barely told.

This new feminism has also affected the way people look. Museums and galleries – especially those representing a canonical European art tradition – burst with images of women disrobed and displayed for the delectation of men. Of course, there is nothing new about recognising the extent to which the spectacularisation of the female body has been part of a structure of oppression of women by men. The “male gaze” has been discussed by feminist critics for decades. It became part of popular culture when John Berger’s groundbreaking TV series Ways of Seeing invited a group of women to sit around a coffee table with cigarettes and glasses of wine to discuss the portrayal of the female body in art. “Men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at,” Berger intones gloomily at the start of the episode.

Nevertheless, in the last few years, the borderlines of acceptable looking have become blurred. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York received a petition to remove Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming, a painting of a young girl reclining on a chair, one leg up on a stool to reveal her underwear. In Britain, John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs – which shows the seduction of Heracles’s lover by bare-breasted water nymphs – was temporarily taken down from Manchester Art Gallery, in a move that was at the time widely regarded as censorship (wrongly, the museum argued).

Other reassessments of works made in the past include the “Rhodes must fall” campaign to remove statues of arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the universities of Oxford and Cape Town, as well as the recently announced move by Notre Dame University in Indiana to cover its 1880s murals depicting stereotypical images of Native Americans.

Last autumn, there was a flurry of a different kind, as the Royal Academy of Arts in London announced a new exhibition: The Renaissance Nude, an 80-work examination of the naked body in European art of the 15th and 16th centuries. The show was greeted as a post-#MeToo event, since it is to feature broadly equal numbers of male and female bodies. There was even talk of a “makeshift gender quota”.

The curators have been quick to refute this: it has nothing to do with #MeToo, they say, having been in the planning for many years. Curator Per Rumberg told me that the broad equality of numbers was simply a reflection of the period: during the 15th century, the male body was scrutinised and portrayed just as much as the female form.

The exhibition might be seen as an attempt to complicate rather than simplify the story of representations of the naked body. Concentrating on a narrow, if culturally dominant, slice of art history, it looks at work from Italy, Germany, France and the Low Countries created during the long 15th century, just before the depiction of the naked body became the fundamental mark of an artist’s prowess – before Michelangelo covered the walls of the pope’s chapel in naked men (only for the genitals to be overpainted several decades later); and before Titian and Giorgione set the fashion for reclining female nudes, emulated down the centuries by artists from Velázquez to Picasso.

What radiates from all this is the sheer variety of reasons for portraying the human body naked, and the complexity of the visual traditions artists were drawing on. The dominance of the nude in the Renaissance, the exhibition argues, cannot entirely be ascribed to the rediscovery of the art of classical antiquity. Attitudes to the human body were just as complex, various and messy in the 15th century as they are now, and much more localised – with Germany and Italy, say, working within different moral and rhetorical traditions.

The naked body might be, for example, a locus of scholarly humanist enquiry, its depiction requiring a mastery of anatomy and an examination of real naked models. Studies by Leonardo of the shoulder and neck will make the point in the RA show, as do Dürer’s remarkable self-portraits, illustrated in the catalogue, in which his face and genitals are drawn with loving care.

There are the private, solitary pleasures implied by the act of looking at books of hours – tiny, exquisitely decorated volumes popular at the medieval French courts. In such books, the bathing Bathsheba is a popular subject, and her naked limbs – to the male commissioner of such a volume – might deliver both a frisson of desire and a warning against the dangers of female sexual power.

There is the reminder of mortal frailty implied in an extraordinary elmwood carving, from Ulm in Germany, of an elderly woman, who echoes the pose of classical sculptures of Venus, her hands across her genitals. The work is now known as Elderly Bather but, in a weird foreshadowing of Trump’s famous taunt of Hillary Clinton, was traditionally called Nasty Old Woman – though, as with all such Old Master titles, it was not given by its maker, but became attached to it later.

Scholar Jill Burke speculates that some depictions of male nakedness, such as Pollaiuolo’s famous large-scale Battle of the Nudes, may owe as much to Europeans’ encounters with the “barbarous” people of sub-Saharan Africa as to the more obvious example of Roman sarcophagi, which were frequently decorated with battle scenes in the second century AD.

As for the male body, most frequently it is Christ’s, of course, his skin and bones and muscle and torn flesh a reminder of his humanity and, very occasionally, of his mortal sensuality. Hans Baldung’s startling drawing The Ecstatic Christ sees him writhing on the ground, his left hand reaching beneath his loin cloth.

The exhibition will contain several depictions of Saint Sebastian, the iconoclastic martyr who was, according to Christian legend, tied up and shot with arrows. It is hard not to see some of these depictions as tinged with sensuality even when they are ostensibly devotional: Cima da Conegliano’s portrayal has the skimpily loin-clothed saint gazing soulfully into the middle distance, a single arrow piercing his thigh, his flesh otherwise creamy and unblemished.

The book Seen from Behind, Patricia Lee Rubin’s survey of the male bum in Renaissance art, is a revealing reminder of the complexities of past sexuality. Rubin notes that more than half the male population of Florence had what we would now call homosexual experiences at one time or another during this period. And one image of Saint Sebastian, according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, was removed from a church for provoking “light and evil thoughts” among female parishioners.

In her forthcoming book The Italian Renaissance Nude, Jill Burke argues that because of the nude’s dominance in European art history, it has come to seem somehow natural, inevitable and universal. Some critics, such as Kenneth Clark, even regarded it as a great summation of human creative endeavour. Burke, who worked on the exhibition, argues that we might in fact see the dominance of the nude as strange: non-European artistic traditions, such as those of China and Japan, never developed a taste for the naked body in the same way.

It seems especially important, just now, not to remove nudes from walls, but to look critically, and to resist the universalising power of the familiar. Those sensuous reclining nudes of Titian – his gorgeous Danaës, raped by golden coins, his drowsing woodland nymphs, his Venuses – have an important precursor: a woodcut in an exquisitely decorated book, printed by the Venetian Aldine Press in the late 15th century. Called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, it shows a female figure, naked and recumbent. Over her looms a satyr – half goat, half man – his penis erect. The satyr disappears from the many subsequent depictions of similar sleeping, vulnerable women. But you could say he has never gone away.

Skin in the game: do we need to take down nudes – or look at them harder? By Charlotte Higgins.  The Guardian , February 27, 2019.

Renaissance artists transformed the course of Western art history by making the nude central to artistic practice. The revival of interest in classical antiquity and a new focus on the role of the image in Christian worship encouraged artists to draw from life, resulting in the development of newly vibrant representations of the human body.

The ability to represent the naked body would become the standard for measuring artistic genius but its portrayal was not without controversy, particularly in religious art. Although many artists argued that athletic, finely proportioned bodies communicated virtue, others feared their potential to incite lust, often with good reason.

The Renaissance Nude at the Royal Academy in London explores the development of the nude across Europe in its religious, classical and secular forms – revealing not only how it reached its dominant position, but also the often surprising attitudes to nudity and sexuality that existed at the time.

Nudity had appeared regularly in Christian art throughout the 13th and 14th Centuries. As Jill Burke, co-editor of the exhibition catalogue, says: “The first figure that is nude repeatedly is the figure of Christ.” But from the 14th Century, there was a major shift in people’s attitudes to Christian art and the way it could be used in private devotion and worship. “They were interested in the idea of empathy and using images as a way of really feeling the pain of Christ and the saints,” says Burke.

As a result, artists strove to make images more truthful, with the figure of Christ, the Saints and other religious figures gradually becoming more tangible. This development is evident in the figures of Adam and Eve, painted by Jan van Eyck for his masterful Ghent altarpiece (completed 1432). Thought to be among the first drawn from life, they are astonishingly rich in observed detail. Adam is shown to have sunburned hands while the linea nigra running over Eve’s gently protruding abdomen clearly reveals her to be pregnant.

In their portrayals of the nude, Van Eyck and other northern artists were drawing on a rich, complex native tradition that incorporated not only religious art but also secular themes, including bathing and brothel scenes, produced in media ranging from manuscripts to ivory reliefs. Their development of the rich, lustrous oil painting technique would allow for a far greater level of naturalism.

Northern artists also benefitted from a generally relaxed attitude to nudity. “There’s a lot of nakedness in things like pageants in the North,” says Burke. This was in marked contrast to Italy, where “they had really prescriptive ideas about seeing women’s bodies, even in marriage. The husband shouldn’t see his wife naked for example,” says Burke.

Italians also believed the female body was fundamentally inferior, as according to Aristotle they were not formed properly in the womb, lacking the heat to push out genitalia. Although Italian patrons enthusiastically collected Northern female nudes, perhaps unsurprisingly most 15th-Century Italian artists chose to focus on the male body, although there were notable exceptions such as Botticelli.

Drawing on humanist culture and readily available examples of classical statuary, artists began to produce idealised images modelled on the antique. Ghiberti’s panel for the Baptistery doors of Florence cathedral (c 1401-3), which many scholars see as the inception of the Renaissance nude, shows a heroically posed Isaac, the rippling muscles of his chest exquisitely defined in bronze.

Also in Florence, Donatello created an unashamedly sensual sculpture of David (1430-40), his lithe body and languid pose designed for a culture which readily accepted that “men will find the body of a beautiful young man erotic”, explains Burke. Indeed, despite being illegal, same-sex relations appear to have been very much the norm. “More than half of all Florentine men were indicted for having sex with other men in the 15th Century,” says Burke.

Saint Sebastian was a favourite subject – but it was not only men who were inflamed by his form. An example by Fra Bartolommeo in the Church of Saint Marco in Florence “had to be moved because they thought the female congregation were looking at it too eagerly and having evil thoughts about it”, says Burke.

Despite the unfortunate outcome, there can be no doubting Fra Bartolommeo’s sincere intentions. The same cannot be said for the early 15th-Century illuminated Books of Hours, created for the Duke of Berry by the Limbourg brothers. Ostensibly for private devotion, they included images of figures such as Saint Catherine with a pinched-in waist, high-set breasts and delicate pale flesh, which bordered on the erotic.

Works such as this set the stage for the ongoing fusion of the spiritual with the sensual in religious art in France. Jean Fouquet’s arrival at the court of Charles VII only heightened this propensity. His portrayal of the king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel, as the Virgin Mary (1452-55), her perfectly circular left breast bared to a distinctly uninterested Christ child, was one of the most bizarre examples.

These developments did not go unnoticed by the Church and, after the Reformation of 1517, religious imagery was banned from places of worship. Artists in Protestant nations responded by turning to secular and mythological themes of nudity, with Lucas Cranach the Elder producing some 76 depictions of Venus. It gave artists the “option to explore these themes outside of the religious sphere which allowed for a huge amount of freedom”, says the Royal Academy’s Assistant Curator, Lucy Chiswell.

The portrayal of nude woman as witches also became popular. In highlighting their supposed sexual power over men and the need for this to be controlled, it fed into the growing witch craze that saw thousands of women executed. “It’s not making the nude grotesque in any way, but it’s associating them with these demonic, very strong controlled figures,” says Chiswell.

aly, too, was increasingly adapting classical themes spurred by the expanding interest in humanist literature and poetry. The Venetian artists Giorgione and Titian produced gloriously voluptuous nudes. But despite their evident eroticism, these paintings were often based on descriptions of classical nudes, allowing their owners to claim their interest was intellectual rather than sexual.

In any case, as Burke points out, “one of the testaments of the skill of the artist is to produce a bodily reaction in the viewer – so if you felt erotically aroused by, say, Titian’s Venus of Urbino that was a testament to the skill of Titian.”

Having purely classical nudes was one thing but the influence of the antique in Catholic religious art was becoming increasingly contentious. Michelangelo, along with the Christian humanists and clerics within his circle, believed a beautiful body to be the emblem of human virtue and perfection. But his attempts to reinvigorate Christian art by embracing ancient pagan models in his depictions of Biblical figures for the Sistine Chapel, particularly in The Last Judgement (1536-41), proved too much for the Church. After his death, the genitalia of the figures were covered in drapery.

But despite the Church’s prudery, Michelangelo’s genius was instrumental in the nude coming to be seen as the highest form of artistic expression. After the Sistine Chapel, “everyone wanted their artists to paint nudes”, says Burke.

Over time, the nude may have become predominantly female: but for two centuries, the beauty of both sexes was celebrated by some of the greatest artists who have ever lived.

Is the Renaissance nude religious or erotic?  By Cath Pound.  BBC , February 14,  2019

The Renaissance Nude.    3 March — 2 June 2019. Royal Academy of Arts, London