Born: July 8, 1870, Berlin, Germany
Died: June 11, 1944, Leverkusen, Germany
Employed: 1919
Locations: Germany, UK, Switzerland
While the Bauhaus is not usually remembered for its musicians, one of them, Gertrud Grunow, was among its most influential early teachers. Rather than art works or musical compositions, Grunow contributed a philosophical approach to creativity and the body called Harmonisierungslehre (Theory of Harmonization). This was aimed at nothing less than the full integration of the senses through movement exercises and the learned perception of synesthetic equivalences among sound, color, form, and movement. Bauhäusler Else Mögelin would later recall Grunow’s enthusiastic instructions in class to “dance the color blue!” A series of photographs shows a Grunow student holding poses. From left to right they are: the note “e” and the color white; the same note perceived in a different relationship to the color green-blue; and, finally, the note “a” paired blue-violet, which sets the dance in motion. Although too little remains of Grunow’s legacy, traces of her influence on the early Bauhaus are everywhere. A widely circulated 1923 chart of Bauhaus instruction—published in the 1923 catalogue for the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar exhibition—shows her class as the basis of all studies.
Grunow was born in Berlin and studied music with renowned composers, conductors, and pianists including Hans Guido von Bülow and the brothers Philipp and Xaver Scharwenka. In 1914, she began to develop her own theories and, in 1919, to teach this system, first in Berlin and Jena before she came to the Bauhaus on the recommendation of Johannes Itten that same year. Grunow taught on contract but in many ways functioned as a master; she was present at some of the Masters’ Council meetings, where her assessments of students’ abilities were key considerations in deciding if they could advance beyond the preliminary course. Further, in the 1923 catalogue, she is listed alphabetically, right after “Walter Gropius,” among the masters of form, the most prominent of the Bauhaus teachers. Paul Klee’s son Felix, who grew up at the Bauhaus from age fourteen, would later recall Grunow as Seelenhüterin (“the soul guardian of the Bauhaus”).
Grunow was the only female instructor who contributed an essay to the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar catalogue; “The Creation of Living Form through Color, Form, and Sound” was the first to appear after Gropius’s own essay, even before those of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In it, Grunow explains that sight and, above all, sound are the most important senses, and that the human body is a perceiving instrument that must be brought into harmony. Colors, she explains, are not merely appearances to the eye but “living force,” and the circle is the most universal and fundamental form. “In a place where all endeavors are directed toward reconstruction and companionship in liveliest reciprocation with the world, as in the Bauhaus, the cultivation of independence, born in the subconscious, will, as beginning and constant aid, not be dispensable,” she wrote.
A pupil of Gertrud Grunow, 1917 or 1922
With the Bauhaus’s shift in focus away from the spiritual to the technological, and the related 1923 departure of Grunow’s greatest ally, Itten, her stock declined, and the Masters’ Council voted not to extend her contract beyond spring 1924. Grunow spent her later years teaching in Hamburg, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland before returning to Germany. Through her and her students’ few publications, it is possible to partially reconstruct her theories of the body, perception, and creativity that so strongly influenced the early Bauhaus.