Träume

In this etching, two women rest their heads on a table. The German title of the work translates to ‘dreams': perhaps the two are asleep, or perhaps this is a depiction of a dream. The pattern of their striped robes is mirrored in the leaves and branches that surround them.

Helene Funke (1869-1957) painted another work called Träume, at around the same time that she made this print. The painting shows a group of eight women, two of whom are in similar positions to these women. In the painting, they wear more conservative day dress and appear to be indoors. The painting is in Vienna’s Belvedere Museum collection and can be viewed here: https://sammlung.belvedere.at/objects/4971/traume?.

Funke was living in Vienna when she made these works. Born in the east German city of Chemnitz, she moved to Paris in 1905 where she exhibited her work alongside the radical Fauvist group. She was at the centre of Paris' contemporary art world, and brought new ideas about modern art with her when she moved to the Austrian capital in 1913.

Both this etching, and the painting Träume, seem firmly hooked into the intellectual world of early 20^th-century Vienna. In 1899, the Austrian psychotherapist Sigmund Freud had published his book The interpretation of dreams. The idea that dreams might reveal things unknown to the conscious mind, and that the subconscious might be an expression of uncloseted sexual desire, seems fully expressed by these two semi-nude, semi-erotic women.

In her paintings, Funke used bright colours and bold, expressive brushstrokes. Women were a favourite subject for her, alongside vibrant still lifes. In later life, Funke’s work was often dismissed by the Viennese art world for being overly decorative and ‘feminine’.

Art historian Julie Johnson describes Funke as 'the invisible foremother' of the avant-garde, lost in a history of art dominated by her male colleagues. World War II also caused her to fall into obscurity, and Funke tragically died alone and impoverished in 1957. Unfortunately, many of her personal papers were lost in World War II. What was left of these papers and artworks was found by Peter Funke, her nephew, who spent 40 years gathering a catalogue of her works spread across Europe. Without Peter’s years of cataloguing, Helene’s life as an artist could have been largely forgotten.