Born: Adelgunde Stölzl, March 5, 1897, Munich, Germany
Died: April 22, 1983, Küsnacht, Switzerland
Matriculated: 1919
Locations: Germany, Switzerland
Gunta Stölzl goes down in history as the only female Bauhaus master. From 1926, she served as a workshop master (Werkmeisterin), and from 1927 to 1931, as the technical and artistic director of the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau. She turned the least respected area of nineteenth-century decorative arts—weaving—into modern industrial textile design; in so doing, she achieved a level of productivity not previously seen at the Bauhaus. The basis for this was her lifelong “desire to weave—to design things out of material,” and her particular talent for translating complex compositions into, on the one hand, the most sophisticated hand-woven works and, on the other, innovative prototypes for mechanical production. Moreover, as a teacher, she paved the way for a series of weavers and textile designers who went on to achieve international success. She elevated improvisation and experimentation, making them fixed components of the learning process, and consistently motivated her students to grab hold of the “rope of industriousness” with team spirit and passion.
Born Adelgunde Stölzl in 1897, her family placed a high value on education: her great-grandfather had himself been a weaving master, and her father was active in the education reform. In Munich in 1913, she had taken her high school examination (Reifeprüfung)—still uncommon at that time—at the higher girls’ school (Höhere Töchterschule) and then studied at the School of Applied Arts in Munich for seven semesters, with classes including glass painting and ceramics. Her most important teacher there was the school’s director, the art reformer Richard Riemerschmid.
However, after the First World War, not only did buildings and streets lay in ruins but also hopes and life plans; there was too much sorrow, too much misery caused by the war, too many dead. Stölzl’s generation had grown up too fast and looked at the world through critical eyes. To Stölzl the school of applied arts now seemed too parochial and conservative. The living and working ideal presented in the “Bauhaus Manifesto,” by contrast, was very different and added to the reforms promised to women by the newly founded Weimar Republic. Stölzl decided to make a fresh start and applied.
The drawings in her Bauhaus application portfolio show Stölzl’s sensitive observation and artistic talent. Many works relate to the events of the war as witnessed from her harrowing perspective as a Red Cross nurse from 1917 to 1918. Gropius accepted her without hesitation in 1919, prompting the student’s enthusiastic diary entry: “Nothing stands in the way of my outer life; I can have a hand in shaping it however I want. Oh, how often I’ve dreamt of it, and now it’s really come true; I still can’t believe it.” Even as a young girl, she had had a passion for writing. That her diary entries and letters are today so valuable and authentic is thanks to her lifelong efforts to perceive the outside world in the same open, truthful, discriminating, and critical manner as she did the rich but contradictory world of her own emotions. In the process, she developed a keen sense for social moods: she was one of the first to voice criticism of the anti-Semitic conflicts in the Bauhaus’s early days.
Gunta Stölzl, Untitled, 1920, watercolor, pen-and-ink, and opaque white over pencil on paper
Starting in the weaving workshop—declared a Frauenklasse (“women’s class”) by Gropius in 1920—Helene Börner, who had been employed as a Werkmeister, was ruthlessly despised by Stölzl as a “needlework teacher of the oldest style.” As her classmate Anni Albers later recalled: “At the beginning, we didn’t learn anything. I learned a lot from Gunta, who was a great teacher. We would sit there and just give it a try.” Proactive creativity was required, very much in keeping with the teachings of the instructor of the preliminary course (Vorkurs), Johannes Itten, who wanted to appeal to all the senses and encouraged the students’ individual strengths.
In 1920, Stölzl fell in love with fellow student Werner Gilles, but quickly ended the relationship. Her diary entries show the kinds of inner battles a young woman had to wage, especially in an environment such as the Bauhaus that broke with convention in a variety of ways. Traditional roles could not be reconciled with the growing need for honesty and self-discovery: “We people of today simply have not yet found the form for love and marriage; the same searching that is expressed in all of our work is simply the desperate longing for a new way of life,” she wrote in her diary in late May 1928. She overcame the crisis by committing herself even more to the Bauhaus and became an increasingly influential presence in the textile workshop. In the winter of 1920, her tuition was waived (Schulgeldfreistellung), and she later received a scholarship.
Gunta Stölzl, wall hanging in striped structure, 1923/1925, copy by Helene Börner, original lost, plain weave, wool and rayon
When Paul Klee joined the Bauhaus in 1921, Stölzl immediately enrolled in his classes in artistic form theory (Bildnerische Formlehre). For her and many other weavers, including her friend Benita Otte, with whom she successfully completed a course on dyeing in Krefeld in 1922, Klee became the most significant teacher of art theory at the Bauhaus. As a result of the increased collaboration of various workshops, Stölzl and Marcel Breuer created chairs with fabric coverings—the first out of lacquered wood and a colorful textile fabric and dubbed the “African Chair.” In 1922, Stölzl knotted a Smyrna rug for her apprenticeship exam, and for the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923, one of the rugs for the model home “Haus am Horn.” The following year, Stölzl became the first female journeyman employed in the Bauhaus weaving workshop.
“Nothing stands in the way of my outer life; I can have a hand in shaping it however I want. Oh, how often I’ve dreamt of it, and now it’s really come true; I still can’t believe it.”
Gunta Stölzl
In Dessau, Stölzl was first a Werkmeister, and then, after the students demanded Georg Muche’s dismissal, she took over full control of the weaving workshop as a Jungmeisterin (“young master”). Under her direction, the fabrics and prototypes made by the workshop became one of the school’s largest sources of income. By contrast, the salary stipulated in her contract with the Magistrate of the City of Dessau was less than those of her male colleagues and included neither the right to a pension nor a professorship; the conditions of her contract from 1930 were only marginally better. Since the opening of the Department of Architecture in 1927 was accompanied by a demand for technically perfect, modern products from the weaving workshop, Stölzl developed new lesson plans that placed greater emphasis on weaving techniques, workshop classes, as well as mathematics and geometry. She had students experiment more with synthetic materials, which they tested for qualities such as flexibility and wear-resistance, light refraction and acoustic absorption. The workshop received larger commissions, and closed a deal with the Berlin textile company Polytex in 1930.
Gunta Stölzl, design for a gobelin tapestry, c. 1926, gouache, drawing ink and pencil on paper
Politically, Stölzl—like the majority of students and instructors at the Bauhaus at that time—was most likely left-leaning. In May 1928, at the Congrés internationaux d’architecture moderne in Moscow, she fell in love with the Galician Jewish architect Arieh Sharon, a Bauhaus student since 1926 who had previously lived in Palestine for six years. When the two married in early August 1929, Stölzl’s German citizenship was replaced by that of British Palestine. In October, they welcomed their daughter Yael, whose diapers were soon being changed on a workshop table. However, not all Bauhaus members were delighted that Stölzl, now a wife and mother, was still pursuing her career.
Gunta Stölzl, 5 Chöre, 1928
Gunta Stölzl, sample/jacquard weave, Dessau Bauhaus, c. 1928
Meanwhile, the National Socialist Party (Nazis) had gained support in Dessau and, with the dismissal of the “red” director, Hannes Meyer, Sharon too lost his job. Stölzl now found herself dragged deeper and deeper into a situation that, today, would certainly be considered harassment. Her opponents—the weaving students Herbert von Arend, Margaretha Reichardt, and Ilse Voigt—criticized the workshop’s direction and fought, initially in tandem with Otti Berger, over their entitlement to a share of the profits from prototypes for Polytex. Competition, jealousy, and according to Stölzl, “personal hunger for power,” along with a distrust of Stölzl’s anti-bourgeois approach, increased tensions. Even teachers (including Walter Peterhans, Reichardt’s partner at the time) became heavily involved and Stölzl personally suspected Kandinsky of manipulating the situation. Not even Stölzl’s character and private life were off-limits. In a letter from October 28, 1930, their accusations became a smear campaign: “Mrs. Sharon has utterly failed in pedagogical, artistic, and organizational matters. She is absolutely uncertain and ignorant with regard to all technical matters: in material theory, for example, she cannot tell wool from cotton … Important organizational workshop-related issues are only seen to by Mrs. Sharon over tea and coffee.”
Rising anti-Semitism also took its toll: one morning, Stölzl found a swastika adorning the door to her Prellerhaus studio. Since Klee, Meyer, and the majority of her former students had already left, she had almost no support and it was ultimately only the Communist Student Faction that came to her defense. The new director, Mies van der Rohe, also tried to settle the dispute, and in early January 1931, found in Stölzl’s favor, at least in regard to the complaint from Arend, who was ordered not to set foot in the workshop until the situation was resolved. However, in March 1931 things got out of hand and Stölzl requested legal counsel from her brother Erwin: “The father of a girl … filed a complaint against me with the administration that, above all, is an attack on my private life, apparently casting aspersions of a sexual nature on me…” Her brother advised her to file a libel suit, but she saw only one course of action: to resign that very day and avoid dismissal. “I’m happy to be done with it,” she later wrote to her brother. In May 1931, Stölzl then informed him: “The students threw out the three instigators—Mies then removed them as well, all the masters signed off on his action and posted it around the Bauhaus—then the mayor came with a German National [Deutschnationale, deputy of the German National People’s Party]—and—they were readmitted!—That’s the power of politics, and I just happened to fall victim to it.” On July 7, 1931, Stölzl left Dessau and the Bauhaus for good.
With no prospect of work in Germany, she, along with the former Bauhaus students Gertrud Preiswerk and Heinrich Otto Hürlimann, founded the hand-weaving mill S-P-H Stoffe, specializing in the production of prototypes for the industrial sector and individual textile objects for architects, in Zurich in the fall of 1931. Though it had got off to a successful start, Stölzl had to close the business just two years later, after Gropius referred S-P-H Stoffe’s biggest customer, the Zurich-based Wohnbedarf AG, to Otti Berger. According to Anja Baumhoff, Stölzl’s situation at the time is comparable to that of Jewish Bauhaus emigrants; she too constantly struggled to obtain a residence permit in Switzerland.
In 1935, she founded S & H Stoffe (S & H Fabrics) with Hürlimann; in 1937, became the sole owner of the Flora hand-weaving mill; and, that same year, received the distinguished international prize of the Diplome Commémoratif—Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques at the Paris World’s Fair. In 1936, her marriage to Sharon—from whom she was already long separated—ended in divorce; six years later, she married the author Willy Stadler and gained Swiss citizenship, giving birth to their daughter Monika in 1943. Over the following decades, Stölzl continued to work in her hand-weaving studio and primarily produced textiles for interior design. In 1967, she dissolved the business and dedicated herself to creating wall hangings. “I hope that, in my work, the pulse can still be felt, the joy of weaving,” she declared at the age of seventy-eight. Stölzl died in Küsnacht, Switzerland in 1983.
“I hope that, in my work, the pulse can still be felt, the joy of weaving.”
Gunta Stölzl