by Yanara Friedland

A woman once drew me in explosive colors. I gifted it to my boyfriend at the time, but it instantly caught fire from a lit candle on the dresser. After, he put it in a closet for no one to ever see ever again. Portraits of women that are stored away will one day flood, or should I say, “flower” the streets. The colors will wash down into gulleys, where societies of rats have long come up with a plan. Boisterous rats that are waiting for our descent since the plagues.

A portrait of Nell stirs the fire of a candle. It breaks her face into black shapes. Nell’s body has almost completely dissolved into circular and square brush strokes, which move like curtains of an open window, swayed by winds, by this great argument touring across the sky. “The argument is in part a result of the restlessness of heavenly bodies,” I can hear Nell say. “The burdens of an axis, cyclical existence. Nothing can stay firm here.” Is this the moment her essay on “Wesen u. Bedeutung der Astrologie u. Horoskopie” published ten years later in a journal called Omnibus takes root?

The two other images of Nell on my desk are photographs. One from 1916 shows her wearing all white, dressing a coy smile. On her fingers several rings. She holds her left hand in her right, wearing an adorned cape with only a few streaks of hair touching her eyebrows. The other, taken circa 1938, is a side profile. She sits slumped wearing white again with a cigarette clutched between index and middle finger. Her face stone-like. From a distance the image resembles a Michelangelo statue; the sheer aliveness caught in irreversible form. Blonde hair pulled together carelessly, she looks away from the camera. Lost in thought or grief or fatigue. Again, her hands are oddly holding on to each other. Hands which have their own esoteric life, an extension and expression of the human soul that might be characterized as equatorial. As I look at these photographs, first plums are ripening. Everything is enshrined in smoke from a fire further north. The right hand picks at the left palm, which barely holds the cigarette. Nell has lost two countries, two husbands at this point. The photograph, I imagine, was taken in Switzerland, where she lived through the second war of her life. Herwarth Walden had transferred his entire collection to her before she divorced him, before he left for Russia and died there. In the photograph her back shows the weight of thousands of frames carried across borders.

In January 1917, in their apartment at Sturm’s headquarters at Potsdamerstrasse 133a, Nell Walden has a dream. Franz Marc’s painting “Tierschicksale” (Fate of the Animals) burns to the ground. Marc had fallen in March of 1916, and his work is, at that moment, exhibited across Germany. His retrospective at the Sturm gallery in Berlin just concluded, and his paintings wait in storage at the Berlin Paketfahrt Society. When Nell, after waking from her nightmare, inquires the next day, the storage facility confirms that all paintings have been sent to Wiesbaden. The Art Society of Wiesbaden sends a telegram that reads: “Marc paintings arrived!” And yet, she feels restless, asks Sturm’s exhibit manager to see for himself if everything has been shipped. He returns that same evening with good news; everything is in order at the storage facility. The following day, at around 7:00 in the morning, the phone rings. It is the shipping firm. Mystified at a fire that ripped through the storage facility the previous night. Even more implausible: the large painting by Franc Marc, “Fate of the animals,” was never sent to Wiesbaden and, as a result of the fire, has suffered damage.

The painting shows animals fleeing a forest fire. Initially, Franz Marc had been inspired to title the work after a scene in the Apocalypse: “The trees show their rings, / the animals their veins / and all Being is blazing suffering.”

Nell called these clairvoyant dreams “truth dreams.” A message that is received in the dream state, before it actually takes place. Let me ask you, Nell, about your truth dreams. Did you know you would stay childless? Did the animals on the painting escape the fire and the storage unit? Did they run sideways below the canopy of the Tiergarten, away from nuclear light, through cascades of time? Did they swim across the ocean, the Bering Strait, the Straits of Gibraltar, past melting glaciers? I think there were foxes, wolves, little antler types, and a cow with a bundle of grass in her mouth. The fog of the fire’s smoke from the past weeks still hovers over the bay and the surrounding mountains. Days pass like butter cake in soft yellows. When the war suddenly descended in the late summer of 1914, the galleries and exhibits emptied. Early territorial gains preoccupied the nation. We turn inside a leaf. We turn inside a glass painting. We turn inside a darkness. No one has ever been able to explain what is actually going on. The archives overflow with attempts, mouths running themselves dry. When you first emerged, wet and hungry, this was the most agonized place to have landed. And it is still, as I watch the creek tumble forward, a place in which nothing is normal. A thousand rings of smoke go up behind the sleeping volcano.

I light a fire in the fireplace. That is what you do when it gets cold. It is dark, but I know it is a woman who is talking, because of the way she swallows mid-sentence. The words don’t just leap out; they are swallowed several times over before release. Northern light is peculiar with an evening sun that sails, brimming with heat. Sometimes orange, sometimes filled with a substance that runs a path across the water.

It is true, no one will know who they were, Nell, Herwarth and the inner Sturm circle. Whether their relentless work towards “the cause” of uplifting international avant-garde art was, as many journalists and art critics of the time felt, mostly steeped in aggrandizement, narcissism, and personal enrichment. How enervating Herwarth’ Walden’s polemic struggle for the new art truly was, is hard to know one hundred years down the drain. I, for one, had never heard of Sturm until I walked into a retrospective at the Frankfurter Stirn museum in the winter of 2015. I was struck. Eighteen female artists I had never encountered before on the wall. Not just on the wall, but also in masks, on stage, in written texts. Gesamtkunstwerk was Herwarth’s vision. Sonia Delaunay’s “simultaneous gowns” were intended to make the vitality of the world accessible to the senses. Tour Donas (aka Marthe Donas), who took on a non-gendered identity to be taken more seriously in the art world, exhibited with Nell in 1917. She often welded together materials creating robot like female figures. For many years companion to Archipenko, she eventually retreated to Belgium where one of her last paintings shows her hunched over needlework. Natalia Goncharova already had solo shows in Moscow by the time of the first Herbstsalon in Berlin in the fall of 1913. Two of her paintings for the exhibit Cats and Landscape go back to the Russian Byzantine icon tradition, which was largely lost on the Berlin audience. Herwarth’s first wife, the poet and artist Else Lasker Schüler, had given him his name (originally Georg Levin) and was frequently published in the Sturm journal. At the retrospective in Frankfurt, her Jussuf (Prince of Thebes) drawings caught my eye. Bold pen strokes and vertical hatchings. The small drawings appear spontaneous, absentmindedly.

Nell once wrote that her first husband thought of women as more advanced, more capable, more artistically gifted than men. Or along those lines. And in fact he did exhibit, more than any art dealer and gallerist before him on the continent, women artists. Jacoba van Heemskerck alone had ten solo shows at the Sturm gallery. Also: Nell, soon after declaring her marriage vows, took over the bookkeeping and administrative tasks for the Sturm operation. It remains unknown how much Herwarth championed her work. During the war she acquired all the funds for Sturm by working tirelessly as a war correspondent and translator for Swedish dailies. Sun in Capricorn. These are the bones of facts. The small ink stains on fading papers of history.

I think about recent movies on Paula Modersohn Becker or Lou Andreas Salome, both women from the same era, which work through their relative obscurity in search for narrative. The two women are portrayed as rebellious unconventional libertarians and are, in that sense, predictable and exchangeable. A woman, who follows her artistic temperament, or her desire against all odds, is triumphant and eccentric, beautiful (always) and indomitable. She is ridiculed and obsessive, forgotten and then heralded. I could go on. Not much is uncovered between such protracted arrows. Similarly, Nell Walden remains a nightside. In a thinly veiled satire called “The Taifun,” published in 1919, she is the energetic, subservient and adoring wife Hermione. Herwarth often called her “baby” or “bambina.” It remains unclear why the only memoirs she wrote are about Herwarth Walden’s legacy, bearing only illegible footnotes to her own life.

Above their entry door, Potsdammerstrasse 134a, cubist shapes. I can smell the breezeway to the courtyard, the rotten wood and cold tiles, creaky staircases to their kingdom of three floors. I begin to imagine Nell’s hands on the typewriter, the inflections in her German speech, how close she and Herwarth slept beside each other, if at all.

But let me return to Nell’s truth dream, which was a prophecy or a message from dead Franz Marc beyond the grave. The message, like a warning, came to her before the fire, and yet she could not stop the event from happening. At night the dead, for once, trample on our heads. They must see the world from beyond time, where future, present, and past is of the same flame, and its embers alight over and over again. That night, when my own portrait caught fire on the dresser, Franz Marc’s animals may have crawled past my rainy Glasgow apartment window, feeding on the ashes. Now, by the fireplace far away, I imagine in Berlin a lumpy sun rising. And eternity is a color thrown against the wall. It is a woman who will not come back, even after her name is written over and over again on pieces of paper. The embers bloom, and I will write the fire’s smoke. It is the 21st of October, the day Nell Walden died, which is to say, the day her ashes began to blow across time.