The Moustache and the Monocle: A Lesbian Portrait in Weimar Berlin

In honor of Pride Month, the Jewish Museum examines Gert Wollheim’s painting of a gender-ambiguous couple living in Weimar Germany.

The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum

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Gert Wollheim, Untitled (Couple), 1926. Oil on canvas. 39 1/2 × 29 1/2 in. The Jewish Museum, New York. Gift of Charlotte Levite in memory of Julius Nassau. 1990–130

Gathered with other portraits in the Jewish Museum exhibition Scenes from the Collection, a painting hangs of a gender-ambiguous couple by Gert Wollheim, a German-Jewish artist who lived in Berlin at the height of the Weimar Republic.

The portrait depicts the pair standing in a café during a period in Germany of economic instability and reckoning with the ghosts of World War I. Social convention and sexual mores were challenged, upending societal norms of the times. With its blurred gender lines and haunting quality—the subjects look neither at each other nor at the viewer — Untitled (Couple)(1926) focuses on the shifting gaze of LGBTQ culture between the World Wars.

While fashionable, androgynous, and theatrical, the figures are not obviously women. Newly granted the right to vote, women of the era were called Neue Frau (New Women) and enjoyed greater earning power and sexual freedom than ever before. Wollheim painted the couple to reflect those newfound liberties, and also used a visual trope to identify them as lesbians.

The tuxedo, cropped hair, fedora, and penciled mustache — while seeming to depict traditional masculinity — were recognizable, coded symbols for gay women in metropolitan cities during the Weimar era. Slicked-back hair, white face makeup, thin eyebrows, binoculars, and monocles were also popular style choices within lesbian circles during the period.

The painting was created in the style of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity), a term coined in 1923 for work that expressed the desire to depict everyday reality. Wollheim was part of the movement and particularly close to a circle of artists living in Dusseldorf known as Das Junge Rheinland (The Young Rhineland). Reflecting on the message of his art, Wollheim once said about his work:

“We don’t need style, we need human testimony.”

Born in 1894, Wollheim was the son of German Jewish manufacturers and attended art school from 1911–1913. A soldier in World War I, he was discharged in 1917 with severe injuries that inspired the creation of his most famous work, The Wounded (1919).

A leftist activist, inspired by his traumatic experience during wartime, Wollheim edited a journal of radical art and moved to Berlin in 1925. After featuring his work in their “Degenerate Art” exhibition, the Nazi regime forced the artist to flee Berlin for Paris in 1933, where he eventually went into hiding. It is estimated that 450 of his painting were destroyed or vanished during World War II. In 1947, Wollheim moved to New York where he lived until his death in 1974.

Gert Wollheim’s Untitled (Couple), 1926 is on view now in Scenes from the Collection. Explore other LGBTQ works in the Jewish Museum collection.

Writer: Ruth Andrew Ellenson

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