Thursday 21 November 2024 at 20h
Dr. Ingvild Richardsen - Author and curator
Lecture in English, organized in cooperation with dasKULTURforum Antwerpen.
Lecture in room R.013, Rodestraat 14, Antwerp.
Free entrance. Registration not required.
Sophia Goudstikker was a pioneering European photographer, artist, entrepreneur, and women’s rights advocate. Born in Rotterdam to the prominent Goudstikker family, she trained as a painter in Germany before relocating to Munich in 1886. In 1887, Goudstikker co-founded the Atelier Elvira, becoming the first renowned female photographer in Europe. She received numerous prestigious titles, including the Royal Bavarian Court Photographer and the Bavarian Gold Medal for Science and Art in 1898, the first woman to hold such titles. In 1901 she became court photographer of Prince Albert I of Belgium. Her Munich studio, named Prinzlich Belgisches Hof-Atelier Elvira since 1904, had already become a nexus for Jugendstil and Art Nouveau before 1900, and her work influenced both Bavarian and Belgian artists. Goudstikker’s photography, especially her portraits of women in intellectual and artistic roles, was groundbreaking, making her studio a center of the European women’s movement. Later in life, she became Germany’s first court-certified defender of women and youth. During the First World War, she went to the battlefields as a lawyer to speak with dying soldiers about their final wills. Upon her death in 1924, Goudstikker was remembered as a brilliant and influential figure whose contributions to art, feminism, and photography were transformative and enduring. In 1924, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten described Sophia Goudstikker as “one of the most important women of our time.”
Ingvild Richardsen, literary scholar and cultural historian, author and exhibition curator, studied in Würzburg, Siena, Bonn, and Munich. Since completing her doctorate at LMU Munich (2000), she has worked nationally and internationally as a scholar, lecturer, and author for universities, film, and television. She researches and publishes on European cultural history, the culture of remembrance, women’s movements, Jewish history, Jewish heritage, the Nazi period, and modern art movements such as Art Nouveau. In 2020, she received the media prize from the Zonta Club Five Lakes Country (Germany/Bavaria) and the Mobility Research grant from Meiji University Tokyo for her research, books, and films. She lives in Munich. At the University of Augsburg, she carries out pilot projects and research initiatives. She has published various books about Sophia Goudstikker and Atelier Elvira, and presented both in exhibitions in Munich (2018) and Augsburg (2022).