Women of Secession: Adele von Finck
Ladies in Conversation (Damen im Gespräch / Plaudernde Frauen), 1916
Oil on canvas
90 × 118 cm
Auctioned Galerie der Panther in 2014/Private Collection

Adele von Finck painted this interior scene in Berlin to capture the close circle of friends she spent her days with. Finck had a broad, international background after training in Munich, Brussels, and Paris. This first post about her on our site shows a canvas that records a real friendship between working women. Finck chose to paint active, thinking people in a studio space, completely avoiding the boring, stiff poses of old academic portraits.

The Contrast of the Canvas

Finck learned her trade at several European schools. She worked under Franz von Lenbach in Munich and studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under Jean-François Portaels. Her time at the Académie Colarossi in Paris changed everything, putting her in the same rooms as Käthe Kollwitz and Julie Wolfthorn. This French period shaped the soft, loose colors she used later in Berlin. In this 1916 painting, her brushwork moves easily between the hard lines of the wooden chairs and the soft cloth of the dresses, making the whole room feel comfortable and alive.

The Circle of Kurfürstenstraße 50

The painting brings together four women who lived, worked, and shared their lives in the same apartment building. On the left sits the painter Julie Wolfthorn, leaning forward with a stack of papers in her hand. Below her, young Petra Behrens rests her chin on her arms, years before she would start her own career in modern dance and fashion media. Lilli Behrens, Petra’s mother and a textile designer, sits in the center and looks straight at us, while the translator Luise Wolf completes the group on the far right. Finck did not paint them together by accident; these women deliberately grouped together to share costs, support each other’s work, and claim their own place in the art world.

The Erasure of the Studio

The peace in this room stands in terrible contrast to what happened to these four women later. In 1916, these friends stood on completely equal footing within their Berlin circle, but the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 later tore the group apart through systematic persecution. Because they were Jewish, the Nazis targeted and deported Julie Wolfthorn and her sister Luise Wolf to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Luise died there almost immediately after arrival, while Julie survived for two years under the brutal conditions before she also passed away.

Their non-Jewish friends remained in Germany. Finck, who came from an aristocratic Prussian family, faced strict exhibition bans for her modern style and died in Berlin in November 1943, just months after the state cleared out and closed down their studio building. Of the four people in this room, only young Petra Behrens en Lilli Behrens survived the war to continue her life as an illustrator. Looking at this canvas today, you see four women who had no idea what was coming. They sat there completely unconcerned, with no way of knowing how the Nazi terror would later blow their shared world apart and destroy their lives. That contrast is exactly what makes this painting so exceptional.