A Remarkable Group – the Bauhaus Women

A Remarkable Group – the Bauhaus Women

                    The Staatliches Bauhaus, “whose life span coincided with the Weimar Republic’s and whose history mirrors German history between the two world wars” (Inside the Bauhaus, Dearstyne, 11), was the setting for a group of women who would change design history. Through mass production, the Bauhaus hoped to change the quality of designed objects and the designed environment for everyone. For Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer, the two principals of the school, quality of life was one of the important design considerations in housing schemes. Under Gropius and the Bauhaus masters, students were urged to approach new each problem afresh, studying both functional requirements and the technical means necessary to realize a solution unique to the situation. Historically, most people discuss and glorify male Bauhaus contributors; however, there was a group of women who made important contributions to the Bauhaus school from its establishment in 1919 to the end of its existence in 1933. Despite being under the “rule” of male Bauhaus artists such as Gropius and Meyer, female teachers and students accommodated themselves to the gender disparities, were able to introduce their point of view and perspective of the world into their works, and prove themselves to the world in the areas of weaving, ceramics, metal design, photography, and other art fields. When the Bauhaus opened its doors for both male and female applicants in 1919, there were more women than men applicants for the first semester. Female artists were eager to learn more about the arts. Their work at the Bauhaus would come to have a strong and lasting influence on Modernism.

                     Back in the nineteenth century, women did not have access to study art as academics; they could only take private lessons, and had to pay much more for the lessons than men. However, this situation changed at the end of the nineteenth century. There were more places for women in art schools; for economic reasons, industry was developing fast, and employees were sought. Movements and groups for women’s rights began, enabling women to study at universities. At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, women gained the right to vote, and academic freedom. When the Bauhaus opened, Walter Gropius announced that “’any respectable person whose talent and previous education is deemed suitable by the Masters’ Council may be accepted as an apprentice at the Bauhaus, irrespective of age or sex’” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 9). However, “[reality] won out over Utopia. Gropius had severely underestimated the desire of women to study at the Bauhaus, and was alarmed at the proportion of female applicants” (Women’s Work, Weltge, 41). Even though the Council of Masters established a Women’s Department in order to respond the wishes of its students, under Gropius’s insistent decision of separation, a number of female students were directed into workshops such as Weaving, Pottery, and Bookbinding, even though these were not their choice. The form master of the Pottery Workshop, Gerhard Marcks, was less than happy to accept female students: “’if possible, not to admit women into the Pottery Workshop, both for their sake and for the sake of the workshop’” (Women’s Work, Weltge, 42). This would prove to be ironic, in terms of their later success. In addition to this, the Bookbinding Workshop had been dissolved by 1922. Consequently, there was only the Weaving Workshop open to women. However, even with the failure of the promise by the admission policy of the school and in this unfair situation, there was still “a range of important women – teachers, designers, artists – who taught or studied at the Bauhaus, or who, as Bauhaus masters’ wives, developed their own profiles and carried the ideas and works of the Bauhaus forth into the world” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 7).

Left: Marianne Brandt, 1893-1983 / Top Right: Tea Services, 1924/Bottom Right: Teapot, 1924

Left: Lucia Moholy, 1894-1989/ Right: “Girl Taking a Photograph”, 1929/30

                     In the art fields taught at the Bauhaus, the Metal Workshop and Photography also accepted a few women. Two of the well-known female artists resulting from this were Marianne Brandt, who specialized in metal design, and Lucia Moholy, who was a professional photographer. While metalwork was usually allocated to men at the Bauhaus, Brandt successfully registered into this masculine arena. She was one of the female students who did not wish to study in the “women’s department” - the Weaving Workshop. Even though she managed to enter the Metal Workshop, she was not welcome at first. In a Letter to the Younger Generation, 1970, mentioned in the book Bauhaus Women by Ulrike Muller, Brandt wrote “’[at] first, I was not accepted with pleasure – there was no place for a woman in a metal workshop, they felt. They admitted this to me later on and meanwhile expressed their displeasure by giving me all sorts of dull, dreary work’” (118). In spite of the unwelcoming atmosphere among her male colleagues, Brandt did not give up on her true passion, and her talent was soon recognized. She produced significant designs for ashtrays, a metal teapot, and a full tea set. On the other side of the coin, ‘a story-teller with the camera’ is how Lucia Moholy was described. She was also the Bauhaus’s ‘house photographer’; she photographed works, buildings, and well-known personalities at the school between 1923 and 1928. “Even today, a portrayal of Bauhaus history would be unthinkable without her photographs”, Muller, the author of Bauhaus Women wrote (143). Moholy is viewed as a representative of New Objectivity, “the direction in early modernist photography that developed from a criticism of the experiments of the New Vision” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 143). After being apprenticed to the photographer Otto Eckner, Moholy took her photographic accomplishments and publishing experience to the Bauhaus. Dessau Bauhaus, in the late fall of 1926, was the school Moholy often recorded photographically. However, eventually running out of passion for the project, Moholy returned to Berlin two years later. After a divorce with her husband, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, in 1934, Lucia became stronger on her own artistically, and gradually became famous; she even opened her own photographic studio. She perceived her negative experiences more and more clearly in the context of her social disadvantage as a woman. She fought to be given a professorship, and battled for compensation as a victim of the Nazis. Even now, Brandt and Moholy are considered remarkable female Bauhauslers for their examples of early Modernism.

Left: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, 1896-1985/ Right: Handled Jug, 1922-23

                      The Pottery Workshop, which women were often forced to choose at the Bauhaus, only accepted a few females, due to Gerhard Marcks and Walter Gropius. Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain was one. Friedlaender began her studies at the Bauhaus in the winter semester of 1921 with Johannes Itten and Gertud Grunow. During her time in the Ceramics Workshop, master Max Krehan and Thuringian peasant pottery influenced Marguerite the most. She admired Krehan’s theory that “practice at the pottery’s wheel was much more important in working with clay than the creation of abstract artistic pictures” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 78). Even though Marcks was not pleased to have female students in the Pottery Workshop at first, he ended up having a life-long friendship with Marguerite in Dronburg, and his prejudices against women in the workshop dissolved – her willpower and talent had impressed him. Unfortunately, when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, the Dornburg workshop remained with the Weimar architecture school, and there was no longer a pottery department at the Dessau Bauhaus. Friedlaender then ran the Ceramics Workshop at Schloss Giebichenstein in 1925. In the following year, she was the first female pottery master in Germany to hold such a leading position after completing the journeyman’s examination. Marguerite Friedlaender was one of those Bauhaus artists who emigrated to the United States, experienced great success, and made a name for herself.  

Left: Gunta Stolzl, 1897-1983/ Right: Chair by Marcel Breuer, Woven band cover by Gunta, 1921

                     The Weaving Workshop was the studio that was occupied by most of the female students. Unlike the other workshops at the Bauhaus, the weaving studio was fully equipped. By 1922, the Weaving Workshop could claim more students than any other at the Bauhaus. The Women’s Department, its predecessor, had no defined program of students and from 1919 to 1920 occupied its students with a variety of textile-related activities, such as the crafting of stuffed animals and dolls. “[The] will, energy and enthusiasm of the young women, combined with the caliber of their previous training…gave direction to the Weaving Workshop and ensured its swift rise to importance within the institution” (Women’s Work, Weltge, 54). One of the most remarkable weavers was Gunta Stolzl, who “was the dominant presence in the Weaving Workshop. In fact, its evolution paralleled her own development” (Women’s Work, Weltge, 46). Stolzl started her studies at the Bauhaus in 1919, and left it in 1931 as a consummate professional. She was also the only female full master at the school, and one of the very few women who achieved a management position at the Bauhaus. When Gunta applied to the Bauhaus, her outstanding portfolio gave her a ticket to the school. It contained work produced during her studies as well as free works and drawings from the period when she served as a Red Cross nurse during World War I. It showed not only her talent of observation and empathy, but also her grief and fear at the destruction and cruelty of the war. Stolzl once wrote: “’I believe that most important of all was life itself. It was brimful with impressions experiences, encounters and friendships which have lasted over decades’” (Women’s Work, Weltge, 49).

Gertrud Grunow, 1870-1944

                     In terms of history, female students and leaders of the Bauhaus transformed various disciplines from a craft to an art form. Despite their discriminatory situation, they triumphed to leave a lasting impression on the world of the arts, particularly for the female artists that followed. For example, Gertrud Grunow, the only female form master of the school, influenced the early Bauhaus and later artists greatly with her holistically oriented philosophical plan and the rhythmic musical exercises in her classes. She received a lectureship at the Bauhaus at the age of almost fifty, and the subject she taught, Practical Harmonizing Course, ”entailed training in perception and expression, which served to sensitize, reawaken, and reintegrate neglected sensory organs and thereby ‘heal’ the individual” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 17). Grunow’s teaching career proved that women could be as equal as men in social status; she “not only taught all students at the Weimar Bauhaus but also masters such as Paul Klee and Johannes Itten until 1924” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 19). Moreover, Gertrud Grunow influenced her students. Hildegard Heitmeyer honored her teacher in an essay in 1967: “’Gertrud Grunow’s life’s work encompassed a great and rich research field on the elementary powers, sound, and color, which revealed totally new perspectives and systems that form the basis of out intellectual, emotional, and physical existence’” (Bauhaus Women, Muller, 21). Despite the chauvinism and prejudice they experienced, this group of women proved themselves to the world, and set a pattern for the present day.        

             

Annotated Bibliography

-       Auther, Elissa. String Felt Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art. MN: Minneapolis, 2009. Print.

In the beginning of Auther’s book, she introduces “fiber art and the struggle for legitimacy”, which describes the relationship between cultural definitions of textiles and the Bauhaus weavers. This helps explain more about the female Bauhaus weavers’ situations at that particular time in history.

-   Butler, Cornelia, and Alexandra Schwartz, ed. Preface. Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art by T’ai Smith. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Print.

This written material contains many essays that relate to women artists at the Museum of Modern Art. It interprets T’ai Smith’s essay of “A Collective and Its Individuals: The Bauhaus and Its Women”, which elaborates upon Bauhaus women and their works.

-       Dearstyne, Howard. Inside the Bauhaus. Ed. David Spaeth. New York: Rizzoli. 1986. Print.

Dearstyne’s Inside the Bauhaus talks about the school from the personal viewpoint of being a graduate. Specific accounts of coursework studied by the women of the Bauhaus will add necessary detail to the research.

-   Muller, Ulrike. Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design. Paris: S.A., 2009. Print.

In this work, Ulrike Muller gives the women artists of the Bauhaus movement, in all of their respective design fields, the acclaim they deserve, for the first time. It presents both their lives and their artistic endeavors.

-       Weltge, Sigrid Wortmann. Women’s Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus. California: San Francisco, 1993. Print.

This book unearths a missing chapter in the story of the most important institution in the history of modern design. The author will tell us how the female Bauhaus artists’ ideals and influence live on in marvelous fabrics which are still produced today.