Tattooed Ladies

"Abstract:
Since the end of the 19th century tattooed people in Euro-American societies have been perceived either as exotics from faraway countries or associated with socially-deviant groups such as criminals, sailors or circus people. In the beginning, heavily-tattooed people were showcased, later they were stigmatized, expelled from public places and killed in the Third Reich. In this context the “Tattooed Women” occupy a special place: they were outsiders within a group of outsiders. Exposing the skin of women was unconventional especially to the middleclasse civil society at the end of the 19th century, which insisted on women covering their whole body. The tattooed circus women not only showed much of their skin, but it was also covered with colorful and exotic pictures. In this paper promotional postcards and photographs of circus women held at the Walter Schönfeld collection in Heidelberg are examined. These cards and photographs are significant ethnohistorical sources because they were used as a means of self-promotion. As such, they offer valuable insights into the way in which the tattooed circus women perceived and represented themselves to the outside world. The paper examines the cards and photographs in the context of existing and developing theories about tattoos.


Zusammenfassung:
Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts waren Tätowierte in der euroamerikanischen Gesellschaft zumeist entweder Exoten aus fernen Ländern oder Kriminelle, Seeleute oder Zirkusmenschen  Exoten aus der Nähe. Stark Tätowierte wurden bei Vorführungen bestaunt, aber ansonsten nach und nach stigmatisiert, aus der Öffentlichkeit vertrieben oder im Dritten Reich schließlich umgebracht. Vor allem Tätowierte Damen nehmen in diesem Kontext eine besondere Stellung ein. Sie waren längere Zeit die Außenseiterinnen unter den Außenseiterinnen und Außenseitern. Für die bürgerlich geprägte Gesellschaft Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts verstieß die entblößte Haut einer Frau ganz und gar gegen die Konventionen. Fast der ganze Körper einer Frau war mit Kleidung bedeckt. Die tätowierten Schaubuden-Frauen dagegen zeigten nicht nur viel Haut. Die war zusätzlich noch mit bunten, fremdartigen Bildern geschmückt.
Ihre Werbepostkarten und -fotografien aus der Sammlung Walther Schönfeld in Heidelberg werden untersucht. Diese Werbekarten sind die unmittelbarste Quelle für ihre Selbst-Repräsentation und deshalb eine wesentliche ethnohistorische Bildquelle.
Im Rahmen dieses Artikels sollen außerdem vorhandene und in Entwicklung befindliche theoretische Ansätze und Konzepte über Tätowierungen an das gesellschaftliche Phänomen der „Tätowierten Damen“ angelegt und übertragen werden.

(peer reviewed)
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This Paper is oriented to the experiences of the body, its motion between the self and intercultural experiences and its representation in high and low culture.

The explanation for a globalized aesthetic form of tattooing finds its roots at the very beginning of the 19th century. The clichés on the tattooed body as a criminal, a nomad body – the sailor, the prostitute, the murder – is, so my proposal- the result of the scientific discourse of the time, willing to understand the origin and cause of European Tattoo practice.
As an extension to my work on the first descriptions of  European tattooing, I would like to present the question of the first representations of tattooed bodies in European visual arts at the beginning of the modernity. The question of the representation of the tattooed body opens a range of portraits that respond to other categories than the rest of portraits of the time. The perception of the artist will be defined by the knowledge he possesses on this rare and “new” kind of human expressions for the European of the 19th Century. The presented continuity between the paintings I would like to discuss today concern not only the urgent comparative analyzes, but also a kind of development that should be pointed out.

“Between Arcadia and the Circus: Portraiture of tattooed bodies in the 19th and 20th Century” therefore, is the temporal range I would like to call to the instances within the following representations of the tattooed body as a medium synchronized image-phenomena: For instance the end of painting as an academic art, and the beginning of tattooing as a normalized but subversive production, as well as the invention of the tattoo-machine, in 1891.

The Portraits to be analyzed are: Omai, from Joshua Reynolds, 1778 // Poster of Captain Constantinus, at Folies-Bergère, around 1880 // Liebeskranke (Lovesick), from George Grosz, 1916// Suleika, from Otto Dix, 1920 // Egon Erwin Kisch, from Christian Schad, 1928.