Hedwig Woermann - artist and cosmopolitan, 1879-1960

The biography of Hedwig Jaenichen-Woermann is also a piece of contemporary history personified at the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. The young woman grows up in a cosmopolitan Hamburg trading house, travels through Europe and Africa, decides in 1900 to train for her own profession and marry with equal rights. She studied drawing with Fritz Mackensen in Worpswede and found a friend and teacher for her sculptural training in Antoine Bourdelle in Paris. After being expelled from France in 1914, Hedwig Woermann became a painter. Years of living and working in Italy, France, Germany and Argentina followed. She developed her own objective-realistic style and did not allow herself to be taken in by any 'program art'. She lost large parts of her artistic work in two wars. In 1945, she survived a suicide attempt with her husband Hanns Jaenichen. Hedwig Woermann remained in Wustrow out of love for her house and the Fischland landscape. As a 'capitalist's daughter', as she ironically calls herself, she settles in between the ideological fronts of the Cold War and paints a series of impressive pictures in the 1950s, including several portraits of workers committed to 'socialist realism'. When she sold her house in 1958, she lost her secure livelihood. Her strength dwindled rapidly. On December 27, 1960, at the age of 81, the sculptor and painter Hedwig Woermann died and was buried next to Hanns Jaenichen in the Wustrow cemetery. There is hardly an artist in the circle of the Ahrenshoop artists' colony who is the subject of as many allegations, assumptions, questions and doubts as Hedwig Woermann.

Author: Dr. Renate Billinger-Cromm

Publisher: Atelier im Bauernhaus Fischerhude, "edition fischerhuder kunstbuch"