Women of Secession: Clara Siewert
The Girl with the Blue Hair (Das Mädchen mit den blauen Haaren), 1910
Gouache, colored chalk, ink, and pencil on paper
Dimensions unavailable
©Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg

In 1910, Berlin was dominated by impressionist painters who captured city life and sunlight. Clara Siewert chose a completely different path. She turned away from the fashionable salons to create dark, psychological dreamscapes on paper. Das Mädchen mit den blauen Haaren is a striking introduction to an artist who was decades ahead of her time, yet spent most of her life working in complete isolation. Her distinct voice remains one of the most compelling, forgotten stories of early German modernism.

The Girl in the Middle

The viewer is immediately pulled into an uncomfortably tight circle of children. In the center stands a young girl with long, unnaturally electric-blue hair and heavily flushed red cheeks. Her smile is static, almost mask-like, conveying a sense of melancholic curiosity. Siewert traps her between a heavy, dark-haired figure on the left who looks down in deep profile, and another child on the right. In the shadow behind them, a ghostly, pale face peers directly at the viewer.

There is no innocent childhood charm here. Siewert presents youth as something strange, tense, and vulnerable. This radical vision closely matches the raw psychological intensity that Egon Schiele was developing in Austria during those exact same months. Like Schiele, Siewert used the bodies of children to strip away bourgeois sentimentality, using her models to project inner emotional anxiety rather than idealized beauty.

Nervous Lines and Material Friction

Looking closely at the texture of the sheet reveals Siewert’s modern, erratic style. She did not use standard oil paints, choosing instead to crash completely different materials together on a single surface. The soft, powdery texture of colored chalk rubs against aggressive, scratchy pencil marks and heavy black ink. Siewert applied layers of gouache to create a dense background that offers no depth, light, or escape. This heavy friction between line and color leaves the figures stuck in a claustrophobic space.

The Abrupt Silence After 1912

This drawing represents the peak of Siewert’s public career. From 1900 to 1912, she was a respected member of the Berlin Secession, exhibiting alongside Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. However, in 1912, she broke with the Secession for reasons that remain entirely undocumented today. This separation put an immediate, permanent end to her success. Siewert instantly disappeared from the exhibition scene and withdrew into a secluded apartment with her sisters.

Because of this sudden career break, very little artwork survives from her later years. Her isolation worsened when a wartime bomb hit her Berlin studio in 1943, destroying her remaining papers and the vast majority of her late portfolio. Works like Das Mädchen mit den blauen Haaren are therefore rare historical fragments. They show a powerful artistic trajectory that was completely severed, leaving behind a fragmented archive that scholars are only recently beginning to reconstruct. It was claimed that Siewert had died during the war in 1944. In reality, recent archival research has established that she survived the bombings and the war itself, dying in deep poverty in October 1945.