Philip Monk, editor, Iris Häussler: The Sophie La Rosière Project 6.75 x 10.5 inches; 224 pages; colour: Published by Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) publications, Toronto November 2018.

Iris Häussler, David Moos, Sarah Milroy and Martha Baillie (2011) Iris Häussler: He Named Her Amber Catalogue of the site-specific installation. Art Gallery of Ontario; 184 pp, 80 colour illustrations; Hardcover 9x7"; ISBN 978-1-89424368-1 (Available in catalogs).

Martina Fuchs, Christiane Meyer-Stoll (2001) Ich war's nicht / It wasn't me - Comprehensive catalogue 1989 - 2001. Bilingual English/German. Hardcover, 128 pp. ISBN 3-936127-02-6. (Available in catalogs)

Begleiterscheinungen. Ed. Iris Häussler and KUNSTHAUS DRESDEN. München 2000. Text: Dr. Martina Fuchs.

Blind Date (with Maria Lindberg). Ed.: IASPIS, Konstakademien Stockholm. Stockholm/München 1998. Interview: Susanne Gaensheimer, Maria Lind, Maria Lindberg and Iris Häussler.

Leihgaben. Hrg.: Förderverein für instabile Medien, Potsdam 1996. Text: Thomas Kumlehn and Conversation between Thomas Kumlehn and Iris Häussler.

Huckepack. Hrg.: Iris Häussler und Förderkreis der Leipziger Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst. Leipzig 1995. Text: Klaus Werner.

Paidi. Hrg.: Martina Fuchs und Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Kunstraum München e.V. München 1994.

Pro Polis. Hrg.: Goethe Institut Mailand und Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München/Mailand 1993. Texte: Lucia Matina, Christiane Meyer-Stoll.

Ou Topos - eine synthetische Erinnerung. Hrg.: Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München (Monografienreihe Förderpreise 1991), München 1991. Text: Christiane Meyer-Stoll.

Ou Topos - eine synthetische Erinnerung. Hrg.: Volksbildungswerk der Stadt Wien, Wien 1989. Text: Wieland Schmied.

Iris Häussler is best known for her unsettling, immersive installations that revolve around fictitious persona and their artistic legacies. Detailed, historically researched biographies of invented characters build the basis from which she creates the material evidence of their obsessive lives and works.

In collaboration with art-institutions and museums, these hyper-realistic environments are often shown interwoven into the local historic, social, economic and geographic contexts. Visitors to these installations often refer to their experience as “having walked through a novel in three dimensions”.

While Iris’ work is often shown in the traditional setting of the White Cube, visitors sometimes experience her work in a more dramatic way in off-site spaces. This has a long history: she created her very first site specific art-installation in the womens toilets at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1984.  Since then, she exhibited in basements, trailers, garages, apartments, churches, chapels,  hotel-rooms, stores, industrial buildings and historic houses. This inclusive approach widens the audience to the community of neighbors and passers-by who might not otherwise engage with art.

Because Häussler is interested in the fragile boundaries between fiction and reality, these works are sometimes not immediately revealed as contemporary artworks, a matter inviting discussions and controversies about visitors encountering unlabeled artworks in and around museums.

Born in Germany and trained as a conceptual artist and sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Häussler’s work is shown internationally. She was an awardee of the Kunstfonds, Bonn, and won the Karl Hofer Prize 1999, in Berlin. In 2010 she was invited on the Cape Farewell (UK) High Arctic Expedition. Since her immigration to Canada she has received grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Chalmers Arts Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Iris Häussler speaks about her methodology and work internationally in universities and art institutions in Canada, the USA, and Europe. Her work is found in international collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Städtische Sammlung im Lenbachhaus, Munich and the Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany and private collections worldwide.
 

 See Studio Views from 1984 to 2020.

See ongoing studio views on Instagram  ​ 

Contact:

iris.haeussler@gmail.com

Representation:

Gallery Daniel Faria

Phone: +1 (416) 538-1880
Email: info@danielfariagallery.com
Address: 188 St Helens Avenue, Toronto ON M6H 4A1, Canada

PSM Gallery

Phone: +49 30 246 492 00
Email: office@psm-gallery.com
Schöneberger Ufer 61 10785 Berlin, Germany

Copyright Agency

Iris Häussler is a member of:
VG Bild-Kunst r.V.

Iris Häussler is a member of CARFAC

The artist volunteers for Flap.org

The Material Evidence
of Obsessive Lives and Works

The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach - Comment by Mark Kingwell

Mark Kingwell

Statement for the panel discussion
Goethe-Institut Toronto, September 20 2006

As Iris mentioned, about a year ago I gave a mini-lecture as part of a panel discussion and suggested that in an age when everybody seems to be an artist of some kind or another, when outside is inside and inside is outside, that perhaps it was time to "disappear the artist". I didn't think that anyone would take me literally, this is the danger with throwing out theoretical bagatelles, that someone will say, yes, that is exactly what I want to do: the disappearing artist. Soon after that I heard from Iris and so I am one of the unlucky ones, I think, in that I knew from the start that the project was a fiction. But nevertheless, when I went to the house, and I am sure that those of you who have gone, as it were, inside the frame, have had an experience which is strangely moving anyway.

This is what I have been reflecting on: why is it possible, how is it possible, that one can be so profoundly affected by an experience which is structured knowingly as a fiction. It makes me think of two insights from aesthetic theory that I want to put on the table as suggestions for further discussion or reflection, one is from Martin Heidegger in "The Origin of the Work of Art", Heidegger says, the mere object is not the work of art. The mere object - he means of course the painting on the wall or the sculpture in the courtyard - the object is not the work; the work is something else. The work is an establishment of meaning, a declivity of meaning if you like, opened up by the object, as experienced. And the other insight is from the more contemporary philosopher Nelson Goodman, who said: the question is not what is art but when is art, and of course he meant, how is it possible for a urinal or a carpet or some banal household object to be a work of art. It is not merely a geographical displacement that makes that possibility, it is the experience under certain temporal conditions, that I experienced it in this moment, as art.

Both of those thoughts were on my mind as I tried to make sense of my experience of The Legacy. Neither of them goes far enough I think in understanding what Iris has accomplished with this work, and it really leads to the question: what is the work in this case. One of the important aspects of the experience of the house is the narrative and the artful unfolding of the narrative in little pieces, suggestive pieces. So that you see for example the figures with the rabbit ears and the transfigurations of the female figure into a rabbit headed figure before you learn anything about the potential slaughter of the rabbits. The back reading that goes on in that narrative, and then the seizing on the narrative, trying to make sense of the relationship between Joseph and the female companion, the very thing that gives rise to the nightmares ... And outside of that, now that the frame is broken, as the [National] Post in their unethical breaking of the embargo on the work; the headline on the remarkable front-page story was: "Reclusive Downtown Artist a Hoax", which is itself a mini narrative, it's a narrative in five words — "Reclusive Downtown Artist ..." — "Reclusive Artist" — "Reclusive Downtown Artist" — "... a Hoax" — and I have been trying, when I talk to people about the work to understand this notion that it is a hoax. It's certainly not a hoax in the sense that anything has been motivated by a deception with intention merely to deceive. I think of it instead in terms of irony; the kind of irony which is dedicated to the instability of meaning, so that we are as experiencers of the work constantly shifting the frame, inside and outside, going over - and back on the threshold. We knew, then we didn't know, we didn't know, then we knew, back and forth and back and forth. And as we do this, it seems to me the work expands.

What is the work? Is it the sculpture that is inside the house, is it the house as an installation, which in its technical terms is absolutely brilliant, the layering of detail, the material, the ephemera that has been banked up in the house? Is it the reception of the house, the experience of the house, is that the work? Is the work what happens when you find out that what you thought you experienced was something other than what you experienced? Is that the work? Or is it perhaps that this is all the work? That the work in fact is ever expanding, like ripples in a pool of water in which a pebble has been dropped.

Rhonda spoke about mediation, mediation in terms of the curatorial presence - the mock curatorial presence - that one is lead through the house. But I think of this in terms of - naturally, I guess for me - in terms of Kierkegaard's objection to Hegel, that there is no mediation, finally, that the work does not allow itself to be completely substantiated or taken on board, there is always something that lies outside. And I think even after tonight's discussion, and after hours of discussion, I know that many people in this room I have talked to already couldn't stop talking about this work with their friends. There will always be something in this work that will not be captured by our discourse, the work will go on and on ... And I think in this way what Iris has done is really given us a new kind of narrative, a narrative of art without closure, where the work doesn't ever end, and where, if you like we have almost a new category of art, the "haptic conceptual", where the experience is profoundly physical and moving, where you feel it in your body, and it is at the same time a conceptual piece, a piece which forces one to reflect on the nature of art, the nature of one's experience of art, and finally, maybe most deeply, the nature of one's selfhood. It is a remarkable achievement, not just in terms of its notoriety, its notoriety, I hope we would all agree is just the scratching at the surface, and beneath the surface there is more, and more, and more.

©  Mark Kingwell

The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach - Comment by Amy Lavender-Harris

Amy Lavender-Harris  "The City's Vanishing Narratives"

Statement for the panel discussion
Goethe-Institut Toronto, September 20 2006

Toronto is a city of narratives that appear and vanish like bicycles weaving in and out of the city’s traffic, like the lights of the CN Tower slicing through a thick fog, or like an elderly neighbour who peers through her curtains every time you pass until one day she vanishes, taking her silence with her.

In this city we are ambivalent about eccentricity: houses filled with cats or other collections, homeless shopping bag ladies rumoured to be worth thousands of dollars, a dead man found mummified in his apartment, or a reclusive artist who leaves behind a dwelling filled with disturbing and moving sculptures.

We are ambivalent, not because these eccentrics are really so strange, but because we are both fascinated and frightened to recognise something of ourselves in them. We have our own collections, our own propensity for hoarding objects. We have our own secrets, parts of the past we conceal from our neighbours. We wonder, just a little, whether our own orbit might take us far enough from the centre of things that we, too, will barricade ourselves behind brick and wood, or worse, start enacting who we really are in full view of the entire city. We are never sure which would be worse. And when we encounter these stories - especially about the lives of people at the periphery - we look at them with fascination before almost as quickly looking away, as if there is a contagion associated with them.

In this same way, we treat stories about people like Joseph Wagenbach as object lessons. Through them we catch a glimpse of ourselves, and of our city, out of the corner of our eye. This glimpse is often frightening, and we turn away from it after our initial fascinated voyeurism.

—

Much controversy has been made in the media this week about Iris Haeussler’s mingling of reality and fiction in The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach. A prominent director of a contemporary art museum reported having felt betrayed by the revelation that Joseph Wagenbach doesn’t actually exist.

I find this controversy perplexing.

I find this controversy perplexing because we are used to reading narratives open-mindedly. When we open the pages of a novel, we enter the possible world of its text knowing full well that it is a product of the writer’s imagination, and yet we are routinely moved by the characters, and we cry or bristle with anger or laugh as if they really existed. We know that novels often expose a deeper truth about who we are, and see them as mirrors of our own souls.

Similarly, when we look at a painting by Dali or a cast by Henry Moore we do not ask, “Is it true?” “Did it really happen?” We know that in an important way it really did.

And sometimes invented narratives – whether in literature or visual art – tell truths about ourselves we could not handle or accept if they were presented as simple fact. They make it possible for us to confront realities we might otherwise turn away from.

—

When we ask why The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach was conceived as a fictional narrative, we must also ask what it says about us, and about the city we live in. I’ll try to address the second part of the question first, because I think the answer to the first part is wrapped up in it.

In a well known book on urban culture called Soft City, Jonathan Raban wrote that the imagined city is as real, perhaps even more real, than the hard city we can locate on maps. His comment is echoed in Michael Ondaatje’s iconic Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion. Ondaatje observed that “[b]efore the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”

We imagine cities. We conjure them into being through the stories we tell about them. We do so because the city as we encounter it – large, chaotic, and hard-edged – is complex and impenetrable until we chart it into coherence by telling stories about it. When we encounter only fragments of other people’s lives – the tread of their footstep, a flash of colour, a muttered word, and incomprehensible behaviour – we construct narratives about them, inventing motives and identities and even histories, in order to fill in the gaps. Jonathan Raban calls this "the grammar of urban life"

And in the places where the grammar of urban life begins to stammer – particularly when we encounter people on the margins – those who are homeless, or derelict, dangerous, or even merely eccentric or reclusive – people about whom we construct unkind caricatures or – worse – about whom we construct no stories at all, we are left with the imaginations of writers, or conceptual artists like Iris Haeussler.

Iris conjured Joseph Wagenbach into being because in this city we lack a narrative that enfolds his experience and his way of being. His story – that of an immigrant who might never have felt comfortable with the culture here, who had suffered almost unimaginable losses but who seemed to have nobody to share them or seek solace with, who settled into a quiet neighbourhood with other immigrants, and who kept to himself, retreating until there was nothing left of him but his sculptures and some clues to build an identity around – is not a story that fits easily with the larger narratives of our Toronto as an open, multicultural city where everybody fits in and is equally visible.

And when we visit Joseph’s house, we are alarmed, and disturbed, and also moved. We begin to realise that Joseph is real, perhaps even more real than some of us in our ordinary, careful passage through the city. We realise that both Joseph and his house are a microsm of the city, of its histories and identities and its grief, and its longing.

And we are reminded of other Josephs, both real ones and invented ones. Because there are both real and fictional precedents of The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach.

In Robertson Davies’ Toronto novel, The Rebel Angels (1981), the apartments of a reclusive art collector are found upon his death to be filled with paintings and art works, to many they are catalogued and even unwrapped. The reclusive Arthur Cornish, it appeared, hoarded these works and hid them, and himself, from view.

And there are real precedents for Joseph Wagenbach, too. In 2005, a reclusive man named Janos Buda was found dead in his downtown Toronto apartment, his body lying undiscovered for so long that it had mummified. But the most fascinating thing about Janos’ apartment wasn’t that he had died and lain there so long. The most interesting thing was that his apartment was found filled with his own paintings of Toronto scenes and people. Few people had known about this work because he kept to himself. He kept to himself so well that nobody noticed when he died. But the Scarborough Arts Council mounted a show of his works, and efforts have been made to preserve them.

And so we are fascinated with Joseph Wagenbach, just as we are fascinated with the fictional story of Francis Cornish, or with the real story of Janos Buda, or with the urban legends of rich shopping bag ladies and houses filled with newspapers and furniture and cats. And we remember the houses we have seen in downtown Toronto neighbourhoods, such as the house a few blocks away from Robinson Street whose garden is filled with shrouded stuffed animals hung from the trees in plastic bags.

We are fascinated by Joseph Wagenbach, but this time we do not turn away, as we do from cat ladies and crazy old men, and as we did from the story of Janos Buda, erasing it from our minds after our initial, horrified, voyeurism. We do not turn away because we are invited to enter Joseph’s world, to see how he lived, to empathize with his life, and to consider how our own might be a little like it.

—

Iris’ work - her conjuring of Joseph - has invited us to encounter someone else’s life innocently, has invited us to be open to a pure encounter. Had we known of it from the beginning as a conceptual art project, our vision might have been constrained by the drive to interpret Joseph as a work of art, or as a spectacle to which we were audience. But Joseph would have been lost in such a way of seeing. We might not have been able to empathise, and we certainly would not have felt free to invent a narrative of him that was sensitive to his history, to his own losses and longings, to his own need to work out his traumas in his sculptures and collections.

In my view, the great gift Iris has given us is the gift of seeing Joseph Wagenbach, and the city, not just as art but as life.

We care about who Joseph is because we have encountered him as a person rather than as a work of art. And more importantly, we care about Joseph because we have been able to encounter a part of the city that we would otherwise remain closed to experiencing.

©  Amy Lavender–Harris

The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach - Comment by Marcus Schubert

Marcus Schubert

Statement for the panel discussion
Goethe-Institut Toronto, September 20 2006

It was about 1981 when I first met my own Joseph Wagenbach. While preparing for a photography trip overseas and waiting for the weather report, I noticed a television segment about a very curious place. I am not sure whether anyone in this room knows who Ferdinand Cheval is? Anyone?... raise your hands... a couple. Cheval was a postal worker, living in rural France, who worked for 33 years creating an astounding piece of architecture. Each day he would follow his letter mail route twice; once to deliver the mail and a second time with a wheelbarrow, to pick up curious objects and interesting rocks. Over time Cheval amassed a mountain of rubble in his back yard. Then, on one night, he had an extraordinary, lucid dream where he envisioned himself creating a fantastic monument. Working mainly at night by candlelight, the very next evening he began a thirty-three year project (96,000 hours), spending half his paycheque on concrete. Facteur Cheval (as he was known) created the Palais Idéal — an extraordinary two-story building that expressed something otherworldly and visionary. In fact this creation was: Cheval’s homage to all world architecture and philosophy, his own genius and his intended final resting place.

I decided I would have to visit this place, to see for myself. And while on that trip through Europe, the moment I first came upon on the Palais Idéal, I came to realize the dedication it takes to commit one's life to the realization of something ephemeral, so unlike what we are taught by culture. I immediately began to reconsider the value of my academic training as an artist, for in this masterwork there was no rhetoric, no need for or validation by fame, fortune or celebrity. This was a person simply obsessed by the act of creation. And the results were astounding. So I became really fascinated with this and began to look for more of this kind of manifestation and spent about fifteen years travelling through Europe and the United States mainly, rooting these people out, to find them wherever they had left something, photographing them if they were still alive or just what they made and left behind.

Subsequently, my experience of research, seeking-out and finding more places that embodied this extraordinary creative power became my modus operandi. As I got closer to each location, I became very anxious about what I was going to experience, especially if the person who was making the environment was still alive. Sometimes it was an exterior, sometimes it was an interior, sometimes both. But each time one had to redefine the rules, and rediscover a way to interpret what was being created. So, while walking through these places I had the feeling of being innocent — nothing is familiar, there are no recognizable patterns regarding what was occurring there. Essentially these were self-made worlds that are created for whatever reason in order to cope with, or in a sense discover something about, the creator’s own existence. The experience of going to these places and meeting these creative mavericks, either personally or through their artwork, was cathartic in terms of how I came to understand what "Art" means.

One of the important results of Iris' exploration in the Wagenbach Legacy, has to do with the effect upon a community. I think for a community it is vital to have the presence of "antennas" for metaphysical experience. The experience that such rogue creations engender also galvanizes the community within which they reside.

In many cases, when I would find an environment where someone was known to be working that had been discovered or a similar story, they were considered to be freakish and "out of their right mind" and they were first shunned by the community. The tolerance for this kind of personal extravagance is generally very low. Until the world began to show up to meet them and see the work. Suddenly, not only was there a celebrity living among them, but the community was also celebrated by association. Thereafter an incredible support happens; they are accepted and embraced as celebrities, folk-heroes within the fold of the community.

Because the Wagenbach house is only a block from where I live, I often walk or drive past. One of the interesting things that occurred over the course of this past month is that I began to notice the odd person standing outside. As days passed there would be more, and more "gatherings" out front — people waiting patiently, and discussing emphatically. Speaking with Iris I was made aware of the fact that one now had to make appointments, to wait up to two weeks to have a tour! Yesterday I saw [an assisstant archivist] riding his bike down to the house to do an extra "shift" because he said there were no less than thirty-five people standing outside and the daily hours for tours had to be extended.

So here, the same kind of thing had happened in rather short order, as with places that I have described previously. All of a sudden the community becomes unified in the experience of a creative wonder. And people begin to interact, speculating about what is going on, how great it is, or how disturbing it is.

What I admire about Iris' project, is that the research comes from within. I have had the opportunity to experience many such places and so know the "look" of authenticity. The detail to which she has executed this particular work is technically high, the quality of what she brings off is extraordinarily convincing. So I can imagine, because I have that memory of going to original places, what must be going through someone's mind as they see Wagenbach’s Legacy. It's a very disturbing moment, not an easy thing to comprehend where the motivations for these creative acts are born. What one instinctually does is become a detective. Looking at these moments, on the walls, the floor, on the windows — the newspapers from 1975 - the viewer attempts to make sense of all this material.

Everybody looks at a different set of elements and therefore constructs a slightly different idea of what is going on. However, there is a pervading general atmosphere and this atmosphere tells the story of an intense involvement with existence, with a personal narrative that is ultimately expressed as solitary experience, for the sheer need of being.

For an art-seeking audience, the power of this type of work is rare. Going through museums and galleries, I am often struck by the brevity of time and attention given to an individual piece of art. Some say that it is anywhere from ten seconds to a minute, and then off to the next object. The quality of attention span is limited, not being challenged, in my estimation because much of art participates in familiarity; "...oh yes, that looks like a Brueghel," or, "...isn't that an interesting contemporary take on De Chirico..." How often does one engage with a work of art for an hour and still be willing to contemplate its import afterwards? When is the narrative - the performance - so convincing, that one begins to ask, "why am I here? Why do I have privileged access to this place? This person isn't dead, and why all of a sudden does the city open a private residence up?" "What has transpired here?" These thoughts infect the storyline, and we realize that through this work, Iris Haeussler has cunningly implicated our own imagination to co-construct the universe of Joseph Wagenbach. It seems to me a valuable investigation—to give the audience an opportunity to be innocent once again, to invite them to engage hotly with the content of art. I applaud the artist for her deeply moving insight to the human condition, and for her long-term commitment in developing her legacy projects.

©  Marcus Schubert

More...

• John MacGregor reviews Marcus Schubert Raw Vision #21, Winter 1997

• Marcus Schubert reviews Albino Carreira Raw Vision #25, Winter 1998

• Marcus Schubert curates Treasures of the Soul AVAM, 2000

2018 Historias Da Sexualidade. Exhibition-catalogue. Pub. Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, Brazil

2018 Art Encounters On The Edge - Exhibition-catalogue;  Bonavista Biennale, Newfoundland, Canada

2017 Jed Martin - die Karte ist interessanter als das Gebiet. Pub. Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany

*2016 Iris Häussler/Le Projet Sophie La Rosière. Villa Vassilieff Mini Publications

*2016 Villa Vassilieff, Conception et fabrication: Guillaume Ettlinger et Jérôme Valton, Iris Häussler / Le Projet Sophie La Rosière, micro-édition de 32 pages, septembre 2016. Editions FNAGP

2015 Breaking and Entering. Ed. Bridget Elliott. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, Canada

2014 Kunst Oberschwaben 20. Jahrhundert , 1970 bis heute. De. Martin Oswald, Heiderose Langer, Stefanie Datte. Kunstverlag Joseph Fink, Lindenberg im Allgäu, Germany.

2014 The Worn Archive. Ed. Serah-Marie MCMahon, Drawn and Quartely, Montreal, Canada

2012 All Our Relations. 18. Biennale of Sydney exhibition-catalogue, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

2012 More Real, exhibition catalogue, by Elizabeth Armstrong eds., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, USA

2011 Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place. Shelley Hornstein, Ashgate Studies in Architecture. Farnham, UK (2011). ISBN: 978-1-4094-0871-0

2010 Modern Art for Sale: Die Bedeutendsten Kunstmessen der Welt. Henry Werner, Feymedia Artbooks, Düsseldorf, Germany (2010), ISBN 3-941459-16-8

2005 Faktor X. Zeitgenössische Kunst in München. Ed. Siemens arts program, München, Germany (2005), ISBN 3-7913-3377-1.

2004 Zeitzonen. III. Triennale Zeitgenössischer Kunst Oberschwaben. Ed. Stadt Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany (2004), ISBN 3-937577-42-4.

2004 Hasenbergl, Kunst-Architektur-Bauhütte. Ed. Peter Ottman, Christoph Keller, Munich, Germany (2004), ISBN 3-937577-82-3.

2001 Aids-Memorial. Ed. Bernhart Schwenk, Munich, Germany (2001).

2001 "Hand - Medium - Körper - Technik" Ed.: Ulrike Bergermann, Andrea Sick, Andrea Klier, Bremen, Germany (2001).

2000 City Index. Ed.: Kunsthaus Dresden. Dresden 2000. German/English. Text: Dr. Martina Fuchs.

1999 Malsch. Ed.: Walter Storms Verlag, München, Germany (1999)

1999 Stille halten. Hrg. Künstlerwerkstratt Lothringerstr., München 1999 (erscheint 12/04)

1999 Cornelia Gockel (1999) Die Spur des Gastes. Über Iris Häussler - Feature, 1989-1999. German. Kunstforum International, Vol 146 pp. 274-283, June/July 1999

1998 Vollkommen gewöhnlich. Hrg.: Kunstfonds e.V., Bonn 1998.

1997 Jahrbuch 1997. Hrg.: Institut für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, Nürnberg 1997. Text: Gespräch zwischen Christiane Meyer-Stoll und Iris Häussler

1997 Vertrauenssache. Hrg.: Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn 1997. Texte: Annelie Pohlen, Detlef B. Linke

1996 Encircled area. Hrg.: Städtische Galerie Zagreb, Zagreb 1996. Text: Hilke Möller (Interview)

1995 Max-Pechstein Förderpreis 1995. Hrg.: Städtisches Museum Zwickau, Zwickau 1995. Text: Klaus Werner

1994 0,073 ha Welt. Hrg.: Kunsthaus Glarus, CH-Glarus 1994. Text: Annette Schindler, Marietta Schürholz

1994 Renta Preis 1994. Hrg.: Renta Gruppe Nürnberg / Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg 1994. Text: Annelie Pohlen

1993 ars viva 1993/94, z.B. skulptur. Hrg.: Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie. Köln 1993. Text: Martina Fuchs

1992 Magia Naturalis. Hrg.: Galerie der Hauptstadt Prag/Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München, Prag/München 1992. Text: Christiane Meyer-Stoll (Interview)

Coming soon. (We do not collect or share any of your personal information.)

Red : fiction – Black: facts
 

XIXth/ XXth century

1855: Henri Basset (married to Marnie Basset) opens a small cutlery factory business in Nogent-sur-Marne, south-east outskirts of Paris.
1857: birth of Jeanne Smith in Paris, eldest daughter of Jules Smith (d. 1868), Clerk of the Civil Court of First Instance in the Seine department. Originally English, his ancestors immigrated to France in the eighteenth century. Jeanne’s mother, Léontine Lesouëf, came from a wealthy family that dealt in precious metals.
1864: birth of Madeleine Smith in Paris.
1867: birth of Sophie Basset (later known as La Rosière) in Nogent-sur-Marne. She is the only child of the marriage.
1876: During the summer Sophie and Madeleine Smith meet on the Smith family estate in Nogent-sur-Marne when Sophie accompanies her father on a business visit. They begin what will be a life-long relationship.
1883: Jeanne Smith develops an interest in photography. She meets the Swiss-German painter Ottilie Roederstein (1859-1937) and they become lovers. Roederstein comes to Paris to study at the atelier of salon painter Jean Jacques Henner, one of the only studios open in Paris to women in the second half of the nineteenth century.
1883: Sophie is placed in the Sisters Convent in Aubervilliers (north-east outskirts of Paris) as a result of her parents’ anxiety about the intense relationship she had developed with Madeleine Smith.
1887: Madeleine begins to paint and from 1891-1894 studies in Paris at the atelier of Jean-Jacques Henner, sometimes serving as his model. She has modest success, winning a bronze medal in 1891 at the Salon de la société des artistes français for her portrait of Joan of Arc, for which Ottilie Roederstein served as the model. Madeleine develops an intimate relationship with Henner who is thirty-five years her elder.
1888: Sophie leaves the convent to attend to her father who has suffered an aneurism and has been left handicapped. She will live with her parents until their deaths in 1904 and 1905. Sophie secretly renews her friendship with Madeleine Smith and regularly visits the Smith’s domain. Little is known of this period of her life save for her visits to the Smith sisters and her practice as a Sunday painter.
1905: Henner dies after an illness, which ends the project of marriage to Madeleine Smith.
1905: After the death of her parents, Sophie inherits the family home where she lives alone. She begins to integrate herself into the Parisian art scene by attending the art school La Grande Chaumière, which had only been recently founded in 1902 by two women artists, Martha Settler and Alice Danenberg.
1906: Sophie meets Florence Hasard (UPDATE THIS LINK HH) at La Grande Chaumière. Florence is also from Nogent but fifteen years younger than Sophie, and is from humble origins. Florence models at La Grande Chaumière as well as at the Académie Russe (1908), Académie Vassilieff (1909), and then in Russian émigré artist Marie Vassilieff’s new studio in Montparnasse. As a result of her developing friendship with Sophie, she will occasionally poses for the Smith sisters in their Nogent studio.<
1906: Madeleine Smith meets the scholar and historian Pierre Champion, son of the publisher Honoré Champion, while he is cataloguing the print, manuscript, and book collection of Madeleine’s and Jeanne’s late uncle Auguste Lesouëf.
1907: While often in Paris, Sophie steadily develops a more and more intimate relationship with Florence.
1907: Madeleine Smith marries Pierre Champion, who is sixteen years her younger.
1908: Florence moves in with Sophie in Nogent. It is during the period 1908-1918 that the two maintain a vibrant romantic relationship where painting occupies a central part.
1914: Jeanne and Madeleine Smith open an auxiliary military hospital (number 73) on their property where Florence works as a nurse until 1918 attending to wounded soldiers. During the war Madeleine also directs the construction of a library on the property to house their uncle’s collection.
1918: Florence returns to live in Paris and all trace of her vanishes.
1919: Pierre Champion elected mayor of Nogent.
1940: death of Madeleine Smith.
1942: death of Pierre Champion.
1943: death of Jeanne Smith.
1944: With the execution of the Smith-Champion legacy to the French state, and according to the two sisters’ wishes, a national old age home for artists is created on their estate, which still functions to today. Through their will, and in acknowledgement of their friendship, Sophie is invited to be one of the first residents.
1947: Sophie La Rosière moves into the Maison Nationale des artistes, bringing with her, according to a 1947 medical record, “a 
set of black artworks painted on dismantled furniture.” The record also specifies that “some paintings are made on doors panels” and that the resident “refuses to separate from them.” A few years later Marie Vassilieff begins her residence there, where she dies in 1957.
1948: death of Sophie La Rosière.
1976: Creation by the French government of the FNAGP (Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques) to manage two bequests made to the state at the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century: a mansion once belonging to Baron Salomon de Rothschild that is now the foundation’s headquarters in the VIIIth arrondissement of Paris, and the Smith sisters’ large property in Nogent-sur-Marne, including La Maison Nationale des artistes. In accordance with the Smith sisters’ wishes, the Lesouëf archive originally stored in the Lesouëf Library – built on the Nogent estate during the First World War – is transferred to the BNF (French National Library). Newly vacant, the Lesouëf library will over time become filled with books and artworks belonging to former residents of the Maison Nationale des Artistes. These objects sometimes stay there indefinitely, if not retrieved by family members after their owner dies.
 

XXIth century

2013: Rui Amaral, the director/curator of the Toronto gallery Scrap Metal, recently opened by the collectors Samara Walbohm and Joe Shlesinger, inventories of two black monochrome artworks in the collection, both made on wooden door-panels. Rui is informed by Samara and Joe that the paintings were bought at a yard sale in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris) during the 1980s. As monochromes, the paintings reminded them of Parisian abstraction of the 50s and 60s (led by Pierre Soulages), but what particularly struck them was the medium. They bought the artworks on a whim, and kept them as a romantic gesture, despite their discordance with the rest of the collection.
2014/2015: Mélanie Bouteloup (Director of Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research and of Villa Vassilieff) and Virginie Bobin (Head of Programs at Villa Vassilieff) research Marie Vassilieff’s life and artworks and give her name to the new arts center and residency space administered by Bétonsalon, which is located in the artist’s former studio, off a small dead-end road in Montparnasse.
Spring 2014: Rui Amaral meets Mélanie Bouteloup in Paris to discuss a potential collaboration. On the same day, Mélanie is expected at La Maison Nationale des Artistes, Nogent-sur-Marne, where she is to meet with Gérard Alaux, FNAGP director, to discuss some documents related to Marie Vassilieff. In order to be efficient, Mélanie invites Rui to come along, as it would be a splendid occasion for him to discover this historical heritage and to visit the contemporary art gallery, La Maison d’art Bernard Anthonioz, also located on the property. During quick tour of the estate, Rui Amaral spots a black door, installed along the wall in the Lesouëf library, that bears striking similarities to the black artworks in Samara Walbohm and Joe Shlesinger’s collection.
May 2015: An investigation led by the Toronto collectors and the FNAGP begins. The C2RMF (Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France) is brought in to analyze the artworks found in Toronto and Nogent-sur-Marne.
January 2016: Thanks to X-ray analysis, the C2RMF discovers under the black encaustic paint an underlayer in oils that reveals an iconography of an erotic nature. The style remains difficult to date, but further, multidisciplinary, enquiry has allowed investigators to attribute the works to Sophie La Rosière and to achieve a better understanding of her life and work.
The chronology of The Sophie La Rosière Project arose from research conducted over three years by Iris Häussler and Catherine Sicot, and was used to prepare the various participants who took part in the interviews. The chronology was exhibited at La Villa Vassilieff as part the inaugural exhibition, Groupe Mobile, in the winter/spring of 2016. It was shown alongside a video walk-through of Sophie La Rosière’s studio, located in Iris Häussler’s home in Toronto from 2009 to August 2016. The chronology (in progress)s has been published in Iris Häussler, The Sophie La Rosière project / Résidence at La Villa Vassilieff, May 2016, La Villa Vassilieff and the FNAGP (Fondation des arts graphiques et plastiques), Fall 2016, Paris.
PS: The biography of Sophie La Rosière may be subject to further changes.
 

Links

Extract from Iris Häussler, The Sophie La Rosière project / Résidence at La Villa Vassilieff, May 2016, published by La Villa Vassilieff and the FNAGP (Fondation des arts graphiques et plastiques), Up-coming in the fall 2016, Paris.

On the morning of May 12, 2016, in the Chemin du Montparnasse where Villa Vassilieff is located, artist Iris Häussler is vigorously washing two solid oak doors that she found in the gardens of the Maison Nationale des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne. This estate, in the suburbs of Paris, was donated to the French Government by the artists and patrons Madeleine and Jeanne Smith. It was also here that Marie Vassilieff, as well as Sophie La Rosière, passed away soon after the Second World War.

In this moment, Iris Häussler is exhilarated by reconnecting with the intimacy of her Toronto studio, where her work always takes root. Since 2009, she has been creating the material evidence of a fictitious artist’s life and work: that of Sophie La Rosière. Sophie would have been an intimate childhood friend of Madeleine Smith.

On the same evening these very doors will hold a “Dîner de têtes” at Villa Vassilieff, gathering those - curators, students, historians, psychoanalysts and scientists - who have been collaborating with Iris Häussler to create and to bring to life the story and work of Sophie La Rosière.

Because Sophie was born in the mid-nineteenth century in the surroundings of Paris, we had to travel through time, rummage through heritage, memories and local histories, as well as the minds of Parisian experts, in order to locate possible traces of her life, her acquaintances and her passions. By bringing her to life through a process involving institutions and experimental spaces and situations, this artistic journey through time and between fiction and reality has taken shape(s).

Since 2013, this total work of art-in-progress has navigated the artistic, historical and scientific networks in Paris and Toronto. Bouncing back and forth, the work itself has changed in reaction to how participants have responded to it. It has become an artwork that has multiple forms and temporalities. At Villa Vassilieff, The Sophie La Rosière Project took the form of a dinner, a workshop, a contribution to the Other Gestures: Uses of Heritage #2 seminar and a presence in the Groupe Mobile exhibition.

Catherine Sicot

Collaborators of the project include: Catherine Sicot (Elegoa Cultural Productions), Philip Monk (Art Gallery of York University), Rui Mateus Amaral (Scrap Metal Gallery) and Daniel Faria (Daniel Faria Gallery), Mélanie Bouteloup and Virginie Bobin (Villa Vassilieff), former FNAGP (Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques) director Gérard Alaux and Caroline Cournède (adjunct director, Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz). Other collaborators include: the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF), with Michel Menu, Head of the Research Department; Maison de Victor Hugo, with its director Gérard Audinet; the Giacometti Foundation, with former Director of Development Alexandre Colliex; the History Society of Aubervilliers, with Head of Projects Michel Sarnelli; and psychoanalysts Dominique de Liège and Yan Pelissier.
The workshop at Villa Vassilieff was developed with students and former students of Julie Morel (Ecole supérieure d’art de Bretagne, Lorient): Marie Cotonea, Clothilde Vacherias, Yoo Jean Kim, Ana-Catalina Escobar, Roxane Jean and Raphaëlle Peria.

Extract from: Iris Häussler, The Sophie La Rosière project / Résidence at La Villa Vassilieff, May 2016, published by La Villa Vassilieff and the Fondation des arts graphiques et plastiques, Paris.

How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

For the last 7 years, artist Iris Häussler has been unfastening doors from their hinges— bedroom doors, wardrobe doors, cupboard doors and closet doors. She releases them from their function as safe-keeping devices, leaving in their absence a tangle of memories, longings and secrets that disperse into the world. But Häussler reminds us that doors, too, absorb the histories they once guarded. Their layers of paint are bandages that conceal the effects of time and use; they are discoloured, bruised, and punctured. In her newest body of work, exhibited for the first time at Scrap Metal, Häussler presents a series of X-ray scans that uncover doors pregnant with expressionist paintings buried beneath coats of black wax.

The series may read as uncharacteristic for a German conceptual artist with formal training in sculpture but, much like the Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa, Häussler gives fabled, historical artists literary and visual form, even if it means challenging her own artistic abilities and objectives. As she describes her first attempts at painting, Häussler notes, “My hands started to paint almost on their own. It was the strangest feeling, as if somebody else would lead my hands, not my body, not my mind. It resulted in what looked to me like a mixture of folk-art, art brut and art deco iconography—infused by symbolism and orientalism.” She continues, “I felt very embarrassed as I could not reference these things in my upbringing, my education or my artistic aspirations before. It felt as if I was a tool for someone else, not the master of my studio practise.”

The paintings, accessible only through their scanned negatives, are gestural, corporeal, earthly and celestial. Mixing her own paint, Häussler experiments with a diverse range of natural, readily available materials such as crushed dried flower petals, mineral grindings, dead ladybugs, and blood. This blend of ingredients carries over to the capricious images she has composed. Female bodies interlock. Seashells and flower-petals fly into orbit. Nerve systems sprout into spiraling ivy. Nipples bloom from breasts. Rivers flow from orifices. Wombs swell into oceans. Although seemingly out-of-step with previous projects, Häussler’s undertaking nonetheless renews and expands her roles as author, archeologist and ethnographer. Guiding her practice is a sensitivity similar to that which has characterized the legacies of outsiders Joseph Wagenbach, Mary O’ Shea and Ted Wilson. It is a willingness to listen when those silenced, overlooked artists come out from behind their doors that confine them.

Since 2009, French artist Sophie La Rosière (1867-1948) has been reborn through Häussler’s hands, as well through research and testimonies provided by a community of active curators, psychoanalysts, art historians, art conservators and gallerists. For the first time in Häussler’s practice, one of her heteronyms unfolds through documentary-style videos, alongside a hyper-realistic reconstruction of La Rosière’s domaine, her artworks, drawings and writings. Working collaboratively with curator Catherine Sicot, Häussler documents interviews conducted by Sicot with scholars who each, by way of their own receptiveness and power, make room for La Rosière—shaping her life and enriching Häussler’s impulses with meaning and authority. Häussler further includes thorough documentation of visits to late French artists’ estates and national archives, lending to the project moments of stillness where history overwrites mythology and fact flirts with fiction.

Häussler’s project owes much to the history of art, and in particular its French iterations. Still, that history—and La Rosière’s place within it—is only one entryway into Häussler’s undertaking. Informing her vocation as a contemporary artist is her interest in the loss of language and the obsessively, naively produced art objects that stand in for silence. How quickly something that provides security and protection, such as a door, a lover or a father, can leave us cold and scrounging for love. In our search to find stability, we turn inwards, constructing universes for ourselves with signs and symbols that only we understand, in the hope that we might once again feel armoured.

Rui Mateus Amaral,
Director and Curator of Scrap Metal

The Mystery of Sophie La Rosière

The AGYU has spared no expense to ship to Toronto and reconstruct the interior of the studio of French artist Sophie La Rosière (1867-1948), which has lain abandoned for over ninety years. It is appropriate since Toronto had a hand in the discovery of this unknown artist in the first place. Long story short: thinking that they had purchased two modern monochrome paintings by a sixties French artist while on a trip to Paris, two Toronto collectors accidentally discover that the works actually are by an unknown painter who worked earlier in the century. In January 2016, as a result of similar works discovered at the Maison Nationale des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, they engage the C2RMF—Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France—to x-ray the encaustic panels. The x-rays surprisingly reveal two erotic paintings hidden beneath the black encaustic.

This discovery set off a line of inquiry. Who was Sophie La Rosière and why is nothing known about her artistic career? Furthermore, and more strangely, why were the paintings disguised and hidden under an obscuring layer of encaustic, which nonetheless has protected them?

There are no definitive answers, but a few things have been learned about this artist that allow us partially to reconstruct her history, but without the same authority as reconstructing her studio. Art historians and conservators are undertaking the forensic investigation based on the physical paintings, historians are delving into her history, and psychoanalysts are speculating on what trauma caused her to cover her works but not destroy them. Meanwhile feminists are advocating for her place in art history.

What we now know is that Sophie La Rosière never intended to have a public life as a painter and actually intended never to reveal the very fact that she painted. She never purchased canvas, instead painting on dismantled furniture or backs of doors that could be hidden away. After some trauma—believed to be the end of her love affair with the artists’ model Florence in 1917—she obscured all history of their encounter, now submerged in a remarkable series of erotic paintings (revealed only in x-ray, though), which as well was her history as an artist.

The discovery of these paintings ultimately led to the discovery of her studio in the childhood home in Nogent-sur-Marne she inherited on her parents’ death in 1904 and 1905, when she began her secret life as a painter. Reconstructing her studio here in Toronto allows us the opportunity to further unravel this remarkable mystery and bring to light an unjustly obscured (though, admittedly, self-obscured) artist.

Reading Philip Monk [Website]

What does it take to compose a life?

An egg, some sperm, a uterus for holding.

What does it take to compose a life?

Curiosity.

The longing for human skin.

The nostalgia for painting.

A sensing of darkness.

What did it take to compose Sophie?

The exploration to camouflage contemporary art in history, and history in contemporary art.

The obsessive idea that memory might be just synthetic storytelling.

A story that desired to unfold through somebody else’s work.

Endless studio hours.

What does it take to bring Sophie’s legacy out?

A virus of passion and compassion, people with open minds.

Behind the scene:

Never before had one of my projects developed from “closer to the heart than the head”.

The beginning:

In fall 2009, I found myself pondering about how loss is the bone-deep hitting measurement for feeling love. At that time, I didn’t know Jeannette Winterson’s amazing quote “Why is the measure of love loss?”

Starting on my personal story, I began to investigate deeper into “female relationships” in the realm of “the studio”. It did not take long until I was visited by fantasies of images of interlaced female bodies which were nurtured by forms, patterns and textures lent from nature, from buds and blossoms of flowers, from spiral forms of shells and meandering shapes of rivers and creeks.

I felt the longing to paint. An almost embarrassing feeling, because I lack any training, any experience with it. I had never painted, neither in oil or acrylic, and if I did watercolours in my sketchbooks, my laziness led me often to the use of wine and blood as washes instead of reaching into the paintbox. ...So I signed up for a course in oil-fundamentals. I went to four out of the eight sessions, and took it from there… But in truth, that is wrongly reported, what happened can rather be described as: “it” took me from there.

The “it”:

While delving into the realm of mixing paint, exploring different natural ingredients such as ground dried flower petals, dead ladybugs, minerals… it so happened that when I finally put paint on found shelf-boards and other salvaged wood, my hands started to paint almost on their own. It was the strangest feeling, as if somebody else were leading my hands. Not my body, not my mind. The results looked to me like a mixture of folk-art, art brut and art deco iconography, infused by symbolism and orientalism. I felt very embarrassed, as I could not reference these things in my upbringing, my education or my artistic aspirations before. It felt freeing to do this, amazingly energizing and exhausting at the same time. It felt, as if I was a tool for something else, not the master of my studio practice.

Sophie La Rosière:

What had been a loose idea became more and more serious and urgent: the inner image of a woman “who would have done that”. Parallel to my studio work, I imagined her, and soon wanted to give her a name, a biography, a story, an inner emotional state of being, a calling, a trauma, a reason for her work…

I needed her to be “close to my culture”, but “more romantic’, more sensual, more colourful than most German female artists of that era that I knew about.

I needed her to be passionate - more than I would ever dare to be. I needed her “so driven” that she would emancipate in her work quickly, that she would overcome prejudice and moral fears. I needed her to be of an imaginative nature, so much so that she would create her own world in her small house that she transformed into a studio. I needed her as reckless as I am when it comes to using materials laying around to be useful in the studio: making mason jars into pigment-storage containers, bedsheets into paint tarps, pots and pans into wax-melting vats… but mostlyby dismantling her house bit by bit in order to get the painting-boards she could use instead of buying canvasses. And I came up with the naïve and clichéd idea of her being French. French and having lived a about a century earlier than me.

Without knowing the concrete meaning of a “Rosière”, I also wanted to link her to a flower. I had this image of unfolding buds observed by her in nature. Her discovering her own female organs and that of her girlfriends in a way that was not solely linked to fertility, but more revolving around sensual, erotic, lesbian sexuality.

Research and site visits:

As soon as I started giving my character more flesh, I knew I was caught up in clichés, and that I would need to engage into a deep level of research. I talked with Catherine Sicot, who comes from Rennes, France, and who had lived and worked in Paris for a decade. She had just started her art consulting company, Elegoa. She understood, as a cultural entrepreneur, how to facilitate the kind of work that I was attempting to undertake.

Catherine caught fire, and soon we would make a plan of action regarding research, project-planning and on-site visits in Paris and surroundings.

Reflection on concept: or how is this project related and how is it different to my other projects?

One thing easily said is that Sophie la Rosière has taken up more than five years of my life - longer than all other characters I worked with before, with one exception: Joseph Wagenbach.

Related:

• Joseph Wagenbach
• Joseph Wagenbach Foundation

The Sophie La Rosière Project builds on my former complex, site-specific hyper-realistic immersive installations. However, in dialogue with the people who accompanied its development over the years, mainly Catherine, some natural and logical shifts took place: our research became more focused and our ideas for presentation opened up to include a new medium, video.

We conducted video-interviews and I filmed walk-throughs in evocative, real historic places that would allow a blending of reality and fiction. This aspect refers to the art of documentary more than anything ever did in my former works.

This documentary-like style allows something I embrace: the “giving flesh” to a fictitious character by participants other than “the artist”. There is very freeing element in this. Something that allows me as the artist to let the character “grow up”, a very enriching experience of receiving content-contributions from partners, experts, team-members and everybody who was engaged during this journey of creation and production.

While the Sophie La Rosière Project started in the residential, secluded space of a thousand square-foot studio, it now spans two continents, many generations and the brainstorming and contributions of countless generous minds.

Art Historical References:

Creating a character who lived earlier than myself; who didn’t have access to the internet, but only to academic research available at her time and who was further defined by her upbringing and education, provides the freedom of creating that I need for my studio-work and concept-development. However, I am a contemporary artist of the twenty-first century. I am consciously standing on the shoulders of uncountable artists, and want to name some of them here those whose work accompanied me over the last years of this project and whom I think of with gratitude, respect and admiration.

• Gustave Courbet (1819-1877): for his pioneering works in painting, showing women in unambiguous scenes, and depicting female genitals realistically, e.g. in his painting “L’Origine du Monde” (1866), a work that would undergo a 122 year journey before shown to the public first time in 1988 in New York City.
• Jean Jacques Henner (1829-1905): not only for his intriguing use of sfumato in his paintings, but also for his action as one of the first artists to open up his studio to women at the end of the 19th century in Paris.
• Madeleine Smith (1864- 1940): a student of J.J. Henner whom I came across during my research in France. The discovery of her and her sister’s life and legacies became the main source of historical interweaving of my fictitious story with the Smith sister’s real historic life.
• Jeanne Smith (1857-1943): Madeleine’s older sister, a woman who chose photography for her artistic endeavours, but halted later, for no reason that could be found in the family-archives. She was at times the lover of a German-Swiss painter, Ottilie Roederstein. All the photographs I ever saw of her, show her with an expression of utter sadness. I imagine her having fallen between the gaps of tradition and emancipation, of female beauty and inner calling, living a life of comfortable social status but suffering her times’ restraints at the same time.
• Paula Moderson Becker (1876-1907): a German painter whose works I have known for decades, who dared to paint “against her training” in a raw looking, earthen and highly psychological expressive way, leaving academism for the influence of the fauves and committing her paintings to existential rural themes.
• Franz Joseph Stuck (1863-1928): for his seductive highly erotic paintings in a symbolist style, and more so for his undertaking to design his own house and studio as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (now “Museum Villa Stuck”, Munich)
• Séraphine Louis, also known as Séraphine de Senlis (1864-1942): an art brut artist who developed her own practice from scratch (literally, involving even the production of her painting material), under very constrained economic and social circumstances, and who suffered institutionalization in her later years.
• Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972): for her role-modeling of a life of courage in her arts, love and life.
• Suzanne Valadon (1865 - 1938): for her determination to overcome her economical and social constraints, her commitment to her work against all odds, her double role as a model and a painter (she modelled also for J.J. Henner) and for choosing sexual pleasures as one of her main themes for her paintings.
• Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 -1986): who’s sensual paintings very probably inspired Sophie La Rosière’s watercolours of flowers and landscapes. And on a personal note: my visit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe in 2013 confirmed my interest in how museums apply their authority to choreograph the perceptions of the artist-personalities and their legacies for their visitors.
• Gordon Matta Clark (1943-1978): whose treatment of dwellings I perceive as a break from the built structure into the imagined, thereby literally opening up occupied designed and purpose-foreseen spaces for reflection.

And my following peers:

• Judy Chicago
• Arnulf Rainer
• Pierre Soulages
• Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
• Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
• Mike Nelson
• Mark Dion
• Michael Blum
• Rachel Whiteread

...and others

For the free-style re-construction of a psychoanalyst’s sofa: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

“Process” tends not to halt at the border of my studio. The following photographs were taken by Catherine Sicot and me during our research residencies in France (Nogent-sur-Marne and Paris). They give a glimpse into the urban districts we explored, the people we met, the project-relevant referential historic locations we chose for the creation of the Sophie La Rosière story, as well as introducing some of the partner-institutions we worked with.

Florence Hasard (1882 – date of death unknown) was born in the small town of Nogent-sur-Marne, France, as the only child of her unwed mother, Jeanne Hasard. Growing up under modest circumstances, Florence’s mother was a washwoman who held down various odd jobs. As a young girl, Florence accompanied her mother to work at the local chateau. The chateau owners, Jeanne and Madeleine Smith, were artists, and this visit to the chateau had a strong impact on Florence. It soon happened that this place would also offer her very first session as a painter’s model, an experience that might have encouraged her to leave her hometown for nearby Paris. At the age of sixteen, Florence started modeling in Paris’ painters’ studios and modeled regularly at the Académie Colarossi and the newly founded Académie La Grande Chaumière. It was during this time in the pre-WWI Parisian art scene that Hasard had a brief encounter with “a woman from the United States, a painter herself, a beautiful short woman, who was the most courageous traveler I ever met”. This woman is now believed to be Charlotte Partridge, the founder of the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, who often traveled to Paris to visit artists and art academies.

Paris is also where Florence met Sophie la Rosière (1867-1948), a painter who also grew up in Nogent-sur-Marne and was acquainted with the Smith Sisters. Although Sophie was fifteen years older than Florence the two women bonded over their obsession in the arts, became lovers, sharing Sophie’s house and studio. During the war, Florence trained as a nurse and went back to Nogent where she worked at the ad hoc military hospital #73 that Madeleine and Jeanne Smith had established temporarily in their Chateau. While the hospital brought Florence back to the very place where she first became interested in art, the circumstance of the war now introduced her to the cruelties of the times. The trauma from caring for wounded men in agonizing pain, often with amputated limbs, stuck with Florence for the rest of her life. Perhaps this experience caused the end of her decade-long relationship with Sophie. What is known is that she moved out of Sophie’s house in Nogent by the end of the war, and back to Paris.

In 1925, the registry office in the Alsace region of France lists Florence as a resident. Then in 1927, at the age of forty-five, Florence made the biggest leap of her life, registering for immigration to the USA. After arriving in the United States, Florence made her way to Milwaukee looking for employment and also likely searching for Charlotte Partridge, the courageous American traveler she had met as a young woman in Paris. There are indications she may have worked occasionally as a model for Partridge’s Layton School of Art and that she had taken a position with the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, a program funded by the Works Progress Administration.

Florence secretly created a new body of artwork during this time, seemingly her first opportunity to process her experiences with WWI. As we look at Florence’s work – mostly paintings on garments – we can trace the influence of her time in Milwaukee. Her canvas is primarily deconstructed women’s and dolls’ dresses, which may have come from her own closet or discarded material that she salvaged from her time with the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.

It might have been again Charlotte Partridge who would trigger Florence her last move: in 1939, when visiting the 1939 World Fair in New York.

Charlotte gifted Florence a souvenir postcard showing the French Pavilion. At a time when Florence learned about the outbreak of WWII, she might have reassessed her life in Milwaukee or acted out of restlessness - in any case we find her registered as a citizen in Brooklyn in the fall of 1942. Here it is were her tenement flat was found, containing her late body of work that seems to reflect her psyche as well as the circumstances of the World of that time.

Faythe Levine - Assistant Curator Statement

“Florence’s Fabric”

Lending my assistance in weaving together the life of Florence Hasard led me to connecting dots between her life and a plethora of female-focused driven history in Wisconsin. I facilitated interviews with Wisconsin historians and experts, and researched local archival materials, then laced together that supported Häussler’s vision of Hasard’s life.  A highlight was discussing Florence with Dr. Sarah Anne Carter- Curator and Director of Research, Chipstone Foundation and she summarized what I was feeling at my core about the Tale of Two so eloquently “I think about the relationship between history, narrative, and historical fiction. How we can combine those fields to tell stories that can reveal hidden patterns and bring to life peoples stories you might not be able to read about in a traditional history book.”

Faythe Levine is the assistant curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She also a filmmaker and author, over time her work has accumulated into a large portfolio centered on themes of community, creativity, awareness, process, empowerment and documentation. Levine’s two most widely known projects, Sign Painters (2013) and Handmade Nation (2009), both feature length documentaries with accompanying books, have toured extensively in formal and renegade outlets. All of her work aims to communicate honesty, authenticity and quality of life. She has made it a priority that her projects stay approachable and accessible to a large audience, interacting with people in a way that establishes creativity as a vehicle towards personal independence.

Florence Hasard appears in Wisconsin…

Patterson is most inspired when she can uncover and amplify works of art by lesser-known artists. Often these discoveries – although focused on the unearthing – can reveal more about why the work was concealed in the first place; constrictive social norms, inherent biases, or limited access to information are just several reasons.

When Iris Häussler traced Florence’s work to Wisconsin, it was impossible to know what was going to be revealed. Through interviews, archival research, and several site visits, Florence’s legacy came into focus. An immigrant to the US trying to process the trauma of WWI,  Florence arrives to Milwaukee without family or support systems, so she turns to only true family she has known: the art world and the creative process. We then follow her to the Layton School of Art and uncover so many other like-minded, pioneering, creative women; Charlotte Partridge, Miriam Frink, and Joanne Poehlmann. And then we learn more about the Milwaukee Handicraft Project – one of the most successful WPA projects in the country – where it is likely that Florence spearheaded many projects from dollmaking to printmaking.

But what is most compelling, are the works that were generated in privacy, behind closed doors. A broken heart, the terror of war, or the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, all processed and distilled on clothing and textiles. There are few statements are this intimate, this interior. Some pieces reflect on how beauty is essential to the experience of pain, while others act as meditations and seem to be processing trauma in real time through repetition and line.

Our understanding of Florence has just begun, and Tale of Two marks an important step along the way. We have already learned so much about Wisconsin art history, immigration history, the confluence of memory and history, and the responsibility inherent unveiling an artist’s story. One has to wonder what is left to uncover…

Karen Patterson is the Senior Curator with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Starting at JMKAC in 2012, her primary focus is the Arts Center’s premier collection of artist-built environments, which includes; components from vernacular art environments, sections of artist’s studios, and artist’s home collections. She incorporates these works into curatorial projects that explore a variety of contemporary themes. Her recent curatorial projects include The Road Less Traveled: Art environments in a contemporary context; Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez; Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values, and This Must Be The Place: artists and their formative places.  Patterson completed her Bachelor of Arts in Folklore Studies at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, and her Masters of Art Administration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her focus was the home collection of Chicago artist Ray Yoshida.

John Michael Kohler Art Center (JMKAC) exhibition team:
Leonard Cicero, Associate Registrar
Alex Gartlemann, Project Coordinator for Exhibitions
Matthew Hanna, Preparator
Amy Horst, Associate Director
Valerie Lazalier, Curatorial Assistant
Faythe Levine, Assistant Curator
James Milostan, Preparator
Julie Niemi, Assistant Curator
Melissa Hartley Omholt, Collections Manager
Karen Patterson, Senior Curator
Peter Rosen, Associate Registrar
 
Research:
Barbara Brown-Lee, Milwaukee Art Museum
Brent Budsberg, Artist
Daniel Faria Gallery
Dr. Sarah Carter, Natalie Wright, and Jonathan Prown, Chipstone Foundation
Dr. Jodi Eastberg, Alverno College
John Eastberg, Pabst Mansion
Jennifer Gillmor
Brian Lynn
Shana McCaw, Artist
Philip Monk, Curator
Al Muchka, Milwaukee Public Museum
Joanna Poehlmann, Artist
Graeme Reid, Museum of Wisconsin Art
Jacqueline M. Schweitzer, Milwaukee Public Museum
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department

Lenders:
Daniel Faria Gallery
Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design
Milwaukee Public Museum
Charles J. Waisbren, M.D.
Wisconsin Historical Society

Photo Credits:
Photos were taken by Iris Häussler, exceptions are indicated directly on the page.
Additional Photographers: Brian Lynn, Olya Vysotskaya, Faythe Levine, Hani Habashi, Jimmi Limit, Jennifer Sciarrino.

Sophie La Rosière & Florence Hasard: Project-Chronology

RED: fiction
BLACK: fact

1867: Sophie Basset (later known as “Sophie La Rosière”) is born in Nogent-sur-Marne, France.
1881: Charlotte Partridge is born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
1882: Florence Hasard is born in Nogent-sur-Marne, France.
1892: Miriam Frink is born; place of birth is unknown.  
1898: Florence leaves Nogent-sur-Marne for Paris to begin life on her own.
1904: Sophie’s parents pass away. Sophie inherits the family home and soon after applies to the Académie La Grande Chaumière in Paris.
1905: Charlotte Partridge travels to Europe by ship and visits Paris, where it is possible she meets Florence for the first time at Académie La Grande Chaumière as she researches European Art Schools.
1906: While modeling for drawing classes at Académie La Grande Chaumière, Florence meets Sophie la Rosière.
1907: Florence and Sophie become friends and lovers. It is presumed both women form their personal art practice at this time.
1908: Florence moves from Paris to Nogent-sur-Marne to live with Sophie. They maintain a relationship until shortly after the end of WWI.
1914: Germany declares war on France at the start of WWI.
1914: Florence becomes a nurse at the auxiliary military hospital #73 in Nogent-sur-Marne, caring for soldiers from the front for the duration of the war.
1914: Charlotte Partridge moves to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States.
1918:  France, Germany, and Great Britain sign the armistice, ending WWI.
1918: Frictions in the relationship between Sophie and Florence lead to Florence moving back to Paris.
1920: Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink open and administer the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee.
1922: Charlotte Partridge is promoted to curator of the Layton Art Gallery; she proceeds to modernize the collection.
1925: The registry office in the Alsace region of France lists Florence as a resident.
1927: Florence applies to immigrate to the United States of America.
1928: There is evidence of Florence in Milwaukee.
1935: The Milwaukee Handicraft Project, a program of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), begins and employs women, minorities, and immigrants to make handmade products.
1937: Several accounts place Florence working for the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
1939: France declares war on Germany at the start of WWII.
1942: Milwaukee Handicraft Project officially ends as a WPA project. Over the seven-year history of the WPA-run project, five thousand individuals were employed.
1942: No trace is found of Florence after this year.
1944:  The military structure of the French Resistance stages an uprising against the German garrison upon the approach of the US Third Army, resulting in the Liberation of Paris.
1945: Hostilities end in the European theatre of World War II with Germany’s surrender to the Allies.
1947: Sophie La Rosière moves into Maison Nationale des Artistes, a retirement home for artists in Nogent-sur-Marne, France.
1948: Sophie La Rosière dies in France.
1975: Charlotte Partridge dies in Wisconsin.
1977: Miriam Frink dies in Wisconsin.
2013: The oeuvre of Sophie La Rosière is discovered. In the following years, her work is investigated, her life reconstructed, and her art is exhibited in Paris and Toronto. However, the whereabouts of her decade-long lover, Florence Hasard, lingered unsolved.
2017: Unsigned sketches dated 1931 found in the Layton School of Art archives. They are now attributed to Florence.
2017: Curator and writer Philip Monk assesses Sophie La Rosière’s oeuvre to publish her catalogue raisonné. In his essay “Intrapsychic Secrets,” he identifies some paintings originally attributed to Sophie as created by Florence. Monk’s view onto Florence’s work for the first time sparks an investigation into her whereabouts and leads to the discovery of her works in Wisconsin.