708 - Louise Stomps (1900 Berlin – Wasserburg/Inn 1988)

Louise Stomps (1900 Berlin – Wasserburg/Inn 1988) Standing Figure Wood. (c. 1955). Height approx. 49 cm. Monogrammed on the plinth. Schrader LSPjgf3 Louise Stomps is one of the pioneers of sculpture in Berlin Modernism. Born in Berlin in 1900, she had been drawing and modeling since 1918, but it was not until after her separation from her husband that the mother of two daughters devoted herself entirely to art, beginning in 1928. She attended the sculpture class at the Association of Berlin Women Artists, took lessons from Milly Steger, and enjoyed her first successes in the early 1930s. After 1933, she withdrew from the art scene; in 1943, her studio and a large portion of her works were destroyed. Immediately after the end of the war, Stomps was among the artists who revitalized Berlin’s art scene. In October 1945, she exhibited at the legendary Gerd Rosen Gallery alongside Renée Sintenis, Hans Uhlmann, Gustav Seitz, and Karl Hartung; in 1951, she received the City of Berlin Art Prize. She found an important patron in the collector and gallery owner Hanna Bekker vom Rath, whom her brother, the publisher Victor Otto Stomps, had introduced her to and who repeatedly exhibited her works at the Kunstkabinett in Frankfurt in the decades that followed. In 1968, Stomps created a bronze bust of her patron. Like many of her contemporaries, she found a new artistic language in figurative abstraction after the war, without ever abandoning her connection to the human form. The “Standing Figure,” created around 1955, impressively illustrates this approach. The slender figure, standing upright and at peace with itself, is carved from a single piece of wood; the small head tilts slightly forward, and one arm, held against the body, opens it up to form a recess. Stomps follows the grain and texture of the wood, allowing the material itself to become the vehicle of expression. Wood remained her preferred medium, especially after 1960, when she left Berlin and settled in an old sawmill near Wasserburg am Inn. Today, her work is being rediscovered—as part of a long-overdue reassessment of those modernist female artists whose contributions long stood in the shadow of their male colleagues. Like Renée Sintenis, Emy Roeder, and Milly Steger, Louise Stomps belongs to the first generation of independent female sculptors in Germany who first had to fight for their place in a male-dominated field. Following the first retrospective, organized by the Verborgene Museum in 2021/22 at the Berlinische Galerie, the exhibition “Konturen des Inneren” will open in 2026 at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne and will be on view at the Edwin Scharff Museum in Neu-Ulm starting in November. Provenance: Estate of the artist, Berlin. Taxation: subject to differential taxation (VAT: Margin Scheme).