Scandal in Hagen: Milly Steger’s theatre statues and their reception by Dr Nina Lübbren

This talk explores the controversy surrounding Milly Steger’s sculptures of four nude female figures on the façade of the municipal theatre in Hagen (Germany) in 1911. The talk places the statues within broader debates on public art and modernism in German society. The furious debates, conducted in newspaper articles and readers’ letters, reflected tensions over evolving artistic values and the public’s engagement with modern sculpture. Remarkably, very few of the statues’ critics commented on Steger’s (female) gender.

Steger’s work was central to museum directors Gertrud and Karl Ernst Osthaus’s vision for the regional centre of Hagen as a progressive artistic hub that gathered avant-garde artists and architects from across Germany and beyond. By examining the critical debates of the time, as well as the Osthaus’ role in fostering progressive art outside major cultural centres, this talk highlights the significance of Steger’s career and the ‘Hagen Impulse’. Comparisons with other public art controversies, right up until today, further contextualise the unique dynamics of the Hagen case and its legacy for our discussions of modern sculpture.

Nina Lübbren is the author of Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe, 1870-1910 and Narrative Painting in Nineteenth-Century Europe, and the co-editor of Visual Culture and Tourism and Painting and Narrative in France. She is currently writing a book on women sculptors in Germany, 1910-1933. She is an Associate Professor at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.