Anke te Heesen (HU Berlin): Frauen vor Mustern

11 June 2025 | Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Eberhard-Lämmert-Saal, entrance Meierottostr. 8, 10719 Berlin

The starting point of the lecture is a simple iconographic observation: women in front of patterns are depicted in large numbers towards the end of the 19th century; they appear in a serially structured milieu of various ornaments arranged in rows. The surrounding décor and its materiality - the wallpaper, the carpet and the fabric - form an independent pictorial actor that defines the women depicted and with them the respective concept of femininity. These textile or paper patterns surround the person and ensure that the figure appears to emerge from them or is drawn into them, that she is elevated or sinks into the picture ground, in short: that the woman is given her very own jewellery or camouflage. The motif developed in this way follows on from depictions of the Virgin Mary through to the "Reading Woman" and takes up the discussions of the second half of the 19th century about the decorative arts, interiors and the physiology of perception. Anke te Heesen is Professor of the History of Science with a focus on the history of education and the organisation of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and, together with Viktoria Tkaczyk, has been spokesperson for the DFG Research Unit Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics since 2024. She received her doctorate from the University of Oldenburg in 1995 and subsequently worked as a research assistant and curator at the Research Centre for European Enlightenment in Potsdam, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. From 2006 to 2008, she was the founding director of the Museum of the University of Tübingen.