NANCY SPERO

A lifelong activist and pioneer of feminist art, Nancy Spero devoted her career to unapologetically crafting commentaries on injustices against women and entrenched male dominance in society. Spero attended the Art Institute of Chicago before venturing to Europe, namely the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Accompanied by Leon Golub, her husband and fellow artist, Spero learned under French cubist André Lhote and fell in love with modernist expressions of human form, which became her means to highlight inequity within significant historical events. Spero incessantly sought “to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity” through her portrayal of the atrocities. Covering the Vietnam War in her late 1960s War Series and the torture of women in South and Central American countries with Torture of Women, Spero developed an adept approach to visually displaying crimes against women, which are cyclically repressed in times of conflict.

Ballade von der Judenhure Marie Sanders exposes brutality against women, which was groundlessly justified by antisemitism throughout Europe. Synthesizing her image with Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “Ballad of Marie Sanders, the Jew’s whore,” Spero details the merciless, public execution of a gentile woman charged with having sex with a Jew. Spero’s 1991 lithograph epitomizes her commitment to addressing the forgotten victims of conflict, women.

Henry Bieze (‘24)

Bertolt Brecht (1934-36), “Ballade von der Judenhure” (“Ballad of Marie Sanders, the Jew's Whore”)

The ballad depicted refers to the Nazi crime of “Rassenschande”—sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans, usually Jews. The city of Nuremberg mentioned in the poem’s first line refers to the Nuremberg laws: a slate of antisemitic/racist laws enacted in 1935 that codified antisemitic prejudices and banned Jews from most elements of civic life. The violation of one of these laws, “the law for the protection of German blood” is explicit in the title “Judenhure,” (Jew's whore), as well as the “too dark” color of her lover's hair, the black color a marker of Jewishness. As punishment for her crime, the woman’s hair is shorn and she is paraded through the city streets with a sign around her neck, ostensibly declaring her to be an enemy of the state.

This instance illustrates the complex role of women during National Socialism: while Aryan women who adhered to racial purity laws were valorized as the foundation of the German nation (indeed receiving special recognition from Hitler upon the birth of multiple children), those who did not contribute to the National Socialist machine were ostracized and potentially criminalized.

Alyssa Howards, Associate Professor and German Department Chair

While echoing a whole spectrum of experiences in time and space, Women’s History Month has a renewed significance in March 2022. Wrongful acts against women continue to be committed in every society, and agents of change worldwide continue to decry them through many forms, including art. The case of Marie Sanders, a gentile woman publicly humiliated and brutally punished for defying the Nuremberg Laws by sleeping with a Jew, was the subject of a famous Bertolt Brecht’s poem set in music by Hanns Einsler and included in Kuhle Wampe, a film that premiered in 1932 and that was immediately censored.

Nancy Spero’s own interpretation of Ballade von der Judenhure Marie Sanders bears testimony to her continuous struggle, throughout her career, to bring high visibility to the subject of men’s violence against women. Here the artist juxtaposes Brecht’s written portrayal of Marie Sanders with the image of a female figure stripped bare and bound with ropes, which mirrors a photograph found in possession of a member of the Gestapo.

Rhythm, line, color, balance, and space are all examples of elements and principles of art that play a major role in developing movement in a work of art—a movement that conveys a set of meanings and emotions meant to activate the viewer. In the case of Nancy Spero’s own rendition of the Ballad of Marie Sanders, the heaviness of the subject matter is accompanied by a movement and a rhythm generated by the semi-faded and imperfectly aligned printed words, as if to demonstrate that language itself is an insufficient instrument for communicating the extent of the assault and dehumanization of women.

The visual uniformity of the regularly used lower-case letters (used in the lithograph even for proper nouns) is interrupted and counteracted—only in one single instance—by the word “Judenhure,” which uses the capital letter in an effort to elevate and infuse with humanity what has elsewhere been ‘lowered,’ denigrated, and violated through the designations of ‘Jew’ and ‘whore.’

The alignment of the four stanzas in a chiastic structure is reminiscent of a swastika, or an asymmetric cross—a symbol simultaneously of hate and love, destruction and faith, despair and hope. The colors on the right-hand side of this artwork are used to re-humanize the female figure, who appears as a suffering monument in flesh and blood, daubed in pink and black, blue and purple. On the left-hand side, it appears in altered form, golden, haloed, as if transfigured, transcendent, and immortal.

This American feminist artist aims for viewers to connect the dots between all those female figures we have seen in reality and imagined in artistic and other representations. They are figures and bodies that, from Joan of Arc to the witches of Salem, from Marie Sanders to Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, from enslaved black women to transgender martyrs are persecuted by the inner workings of a toxic patriarchal order. The Wake Forest lithograph you see here acts as a memento, or warning, for past and present atrocities not to be repeated in the future. It acts as an inspiration not to lose faith in the cause of gender equality and in a society free of violence, in the determination to continue to challenge the patriarchal status quo, and in the hope (the Latin meaning of Spero’s name)—sometimes against all hope, as the above poem by Ukrainka urges us to do—that the coming generations will learn from past outrages in their pursuit of a just tomorrow where women, all women, will achieve emancipation.

Dr. Wanda Balzano, Associate Professor, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art, CU1993.4.1

© Nancy Spero