Frieze Masters 2026

Alma Erdmann’s small known oeuvre is centred on folkloric portraiture, with particular emphasis on female sitters in traditional Black Forest costume. The present work belongs to this distinctive group and relates closely to Black Forest Woman, dated 1899, exhibited at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1901 and acquired in the same year by the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. That painting represents a compositional and thematic approach which Erdmann explored in further variants. The Nationalgalerie records three versions of the subject and identifies the present painting, sold at Karl & Faber in 1995, as probably depicting the same model in Gutach dress. Dated circa 1900, it belongs to the period in which this subject brought Erdmann public recognition.

In the German weekly journal Die Gegenwart (“The Present”), published in Berlin in 1901, a review of the Berlin summer exhibitions praised Erdmann’s talent and the successful colour, pose and vigorous handling of her Black Forest Woman, identifying her as an artist whose name deserved to be remembered.

Here, the sitter is shown seated in a restrained interior, her figure set against a plain, light-toned wall that isolates her presence and heightens the clarity of her form. She wears the distinctive Bollenhut, its large woollen pom-poms rendered in a vivid red, identifying her as an unmarried woman according to regional custom. Although now widely associated with the Black Forest, this headdress belongs specifically to the traditional dress of Gutach, Kirnbach and Reichenbach. Unlike the Berlin version, in which the hat is held in the sitter’s lap, the present composition shows it worn, lending the figure a more immediate and assertive presence. The inclusion of a table with a cup and bread introduces a quiet domestic note, grounding the image in everyday life.

Erdmann trained in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf under Caspar Ritter (1861–1923), Hugo Crola (1841–1910) and Claus Meyer (1856–1919), at a time when women were excluded from formal academy enrolment and instead relied on private instruction. Her work reflects this grounding, combined with a pronounced sensitivity to surface and detail. Stylistically, her paintings draw on the traditions of the Düsseldorf School and the naturalism of the Leibl circle, while also recalling the compositional clarity and interior quiet of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting.

The present painting exemplifies these qualities in a direct and controlled manner. The figure is solidly modelled, the palette restrained, and the handling precise. Erdmann presents the sitter with simplicity and restraint, minimising narrative to focus instead on her quiet, self-contained presence and the meticulous rendering of her costume.

Formerly in the Pelikan Collection, Hanover, the painting was catalogued at Karl & Faber in 1995 as Gutacherin (Schwarzwaldmädchen), meaning Woman from Gutach (Black Forest Girl), and illustrated in colour. This historical title reinforces the specific regional identity of the sitter’s costume.

Recent exhibitions have brought renewed attention to Erdmann’s work, including Black Forest Pictures: Nineteenth-Century Art at the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe in 2016–17, Struggle for Visibility: Women Artists of the National Gallery before 1919 in Berlin in 2019–20, and Women Artists! From Monjé to Münter at the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, in 2025–26. Her inclusion in these exhibitions places her work within both the artistic representation of the Black Forest and the wider reassessment of women’s contributions to German painting.