Hedwig Jenny Fechheimer (born Brühl; also Hedwig Simon)

The art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer was among the first scholars to consider Egyptian objects as art and, just as importantly, to identify parallels between the artistic sensibilities these objects revealed with those of her own time, especially Cubism, in her theoretical writings before World War I. Largely forgotten until recently, her contributions to the study of Egyptian sculpture represent a transcultural, non-linear evolutionary model of art history that recognized form, not skill, as decisive in art at a time when the notion of progressive artistic development dominated the field.

Schooled in Leipzig and Breslau, Fechheimer first trained as a teacher before studying art history, philosophy, and, albeit slightly later, Egyptology as a guest auditor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (present-day Humboldt University) in Berlin between 1896 and 1902. During these years and from 1904–the year in which she first began to study Egyptology–Fechheimer only occasionally audited classes, attending lectures and seminars in art history held by Adolph Goldschmidt and Heinrich Wölfflin, in philosophy by Georg Simmel and Carl Stumpf, and in Egyptology by Adolf Erman, Heinrich Schäfer, and Kurt Sethe. Fechheimer rose to become an important member of the Berlin School for Egyptology, the leading research center in Germany for studies on Egyptian art, culture, and language.

Announced in 1913 and published by early 1914 by Bruno Cassirer in Berlin, Fechheimer’s book Die Plastik der Ägypter proposed a formal kinship between Egyptian and contemporary art, and Cubism in particular. Published to high acclaim, it served as one model for Carl Einstein’s better-known book Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture, 1915), which, like Fechheimer’s study, pioneered the examination of non-European objects as art. Fechheimer and Einstein had established a close intellectual friendship by 1905, the year that Fechheimer likely traveled to Paris for the first time. In spring 1910, Fechheimer and Einstein visited Egypt together. As Fechheimer’s book influenced Einstein, his work in turn inspired Fechheimer’s interest in French literature and art. From 1907 to 1908, stimulated by her firsthand encounter with the Parisian art scene as well as her friendship with Einstein, she began to lecture on contemporary French painting and sculpture alongside ancient Egyptian art.

New editions of Die Plastik der Ägypter followed in quick succession, with the second appearing by April 1914 and four others in 1918, 1920, 1922, and 1923 totalling twenty-six thousand copies. A French translation of the book also appeared in the first half of the 1920s. Fechheimer’s book enjoyed particular resonance among artists, intellectuals, and poets, as well as her peers. Gottfried Benn, André Breton, Fortunato Depero, Sigmund Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Bernhard Hoetger, Johannes Itten, Rudolf Jahns, Paul Klee, and Max Raphaël each owned a copy or knew of it in close detail. In the case of Giacometti, black-and-white reproductions depicting the head of Queen Tiyi, then in the collection of James Simon in Berlin, may have inspired the artist’s 1936 plaster Tête d’Isabel (Fondation Alberto and Annette Giacometti, Paris).

From spring 1913 until 1931, essays and book and exhibition reviews authored by Fechheimer regularly appeared in the German art magazine Kunst und Künstler. She also published another book, entitled Kleinplastik der Ägypter in 1921. Fechheimer published only once in the French journal Documents, edited by the Surrealist Georges Bataille, even though a list of contributors records her name through 1930. Likely commissioned by Einstein, who formed part of the magazine’s editorial board, Fechheimer reviewed an exhibition of Chinese art that was organized in Berlin by the Society of East Asian Art and the Prussian Academy for the Arts between January and April 1929. As a daughter of a Jewish merchant family, Fechheimer was persecuted and banned from working in Germany during National Socialism. A 1937 review of the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted’s history of Egypt, published by the central Jewish German organization (Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens), constitutes her last known publication.

Fechheimer did not hold an academic position during her lifetime. From 1921 to 1931, however, she served as a member of the expert commission of the Egyptian department of Berlin museums. In addition to her writing, Fechheimer derived part of her income from giving lectures and teaching private art history classes.

Little is known about whether Fechheimer assembled a personal collection. Although it is reasonable to imagine that she might have owned some artworks. The Berlin museums, however, acquired a baboon figure known as the “Narmer-Pavian” (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museum zu Berlin) following her discovery of the object in 1926 at the Parisian dealership Kalebdjian Frères.

In September 1938, Fechheimer attempted to leave Nazi Germany but her efforts to exile came too late. Evicted from their apartment at Helmstedter Strasse 10 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Fechheimer and her sister Margarete Brühl moved into temporary housing at Heilbronner Strasse 8 in Berlin-Halensee, where they subleased a room for more than a year. When Nazi persecution and deportation became inescapable in August 1942, the sisters committed suicide.