Angelika Hoerle

Life

She was born Margaretha Angelika Fick in Cologne, Germany, the daughter of cabinetmaker Richard August Michael Fick and Anna Maria (Kraft) Fick. She had three siblings, one of whom was fellow Dada artist Willy Fick.

Largely self-taught as an artist because the German art schools of the day did not admit women, in 1915 she became an apprentice milliner.

In 1919, she married the painter Heinrich Hoerle. In 1922 she contracted tuberculosis, and she died the following year, only 23 years old. She was buried in Cologne's West Cemetery.

Art career

In 1919, she and Heinrich moved to an apartment in Cologne-Lindenthal that they named "dadaheim" (Dada home). Here they founded the Schloemilch Verlag publishing house, which published the international dadaist magazine Die Schammade and Max Ernst's portfolio of lithographs entitled Fiat modes pereat ars. It was also a popular meeting place for the Cologne Dadaists.

In the same year, Hoerle and her husband were among the founding members of the art group Stupid.

Hoerle worked in a variety of styles ranging from caricature to Dada-inflected surrealism, mainly in the media of drawings, prints, and collages. Her surreal portraits quickly drew attention, but her career was cut short by her early death from tuberculosis. Much of her work was destroyed by the Nazis as 'Degenerate art', but her brother Willy hid 35 pieces, which were rediscovered in 1967.

Portraits of her were painted by Heinrich as well as by such artists as Jankel Adler, Anton Räderscheidt, and Marta Hegemann.

Recent exhibitions

In popular culture

Hoerle's great-niece Angelika Littlefield wrote a play about her, Angelika's Promise, produced at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2009.

In 2016, the German writer Ute Bales wrote a novelization of Hoerle's life, Die Welt zerschlagen: Die Geschichte der Dada-Künstlerin Angelika Hoerle (The World Shattered: The Story of Dada Artist Angelika Hoerle).