Performing the wo/man: the "interplay" between Marianne Werefkin and Else Lasker-Schüler

In 1913, the concept of a “blaue Reiterreiterin” was entertained in the correspondence between the German-Jewish artist, poet, and writer Else Lasker-Schüler and the Munich-based Russian artist Marianne Werefkin. In a poem dedicated to Werefkin, Lasker-Schüler stresses the artist’s Russian origins and childhood emergence as a Meisterin. The essay examines how Lasker-Schüler articulated Werefkin’s practices both in terms of their transcultural/national and gendered differences and considers the staging of complex notions of gendered authorship in light of theories of the “third sex.” Relating “child-like play” to the formal elements of creativity, the essay critically evaluates this in relation to both practitioners’ work as well as to Werefkin’s theoretical position in her lecture “Talk on the symbol, the sign and its significance in mystical art” in the School of Art in Vilnius in 1914