Born: Hermine Louise Berkenkamp, May 15, 1901, Wesel, Germany
Died: April 11, 1976, Berlin, Germany
Matriculated: 1920
Locations: Germany, Soviet Union
Magicians, jugglers, angels, fantastic animals, and other curious creatures—the pictorial cosmos of the painter Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, a student of the Bauhaus in its early days, bubbles over with an inventiveness that makes her work uniquely fascinating. According to her family’s recollections, “she very deliberately positioned herself in the shadow of her husband, Hinnerk Scheper, and focused her ambition on placing his accomplishments as a Bauhaus instructor, color designer, and conservator in Berlin in the right light”; yet she was also herself an artist her entire life, sometimes in the public eye, but more often in seclusion. Her famous witticism in a letter to Ise and Walter Gropius from 1930—that she would rather “balance on thin air than sit on dogmas”—makes her longing for independence clear.
The daughter of a paper-bag manufacturer in Wesel, Hermine Louise Berkenkamp, or “Lou,” as she was called, originally wanted to study German philology or medicine. But her drawing teacher, Margarete Schall, who herself later enrolled in the Bauhaus for a semester, suggested she study at the art school as it was known for its progressive approach. Berkenkamp began her studies in Weimar in 1920, and her first playful sketches, with their filigree elements in India ink, call to mind the works of her instructor Paul Klee. She also seems to have attended the private classes offered by De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg, whose rigid functionalist constructions could hardly be more different from the mystical watercolors of the young Bauhäusler.
Berkenkamp chose to specialize in the wall-painting (mural) workshop, an unusual choice in the early Bauhaus, when most women went to the so-called “women’s department,” the weaving workshop. In late 1921, she undertook several important commissions including the interior painting of the Sommerfeld and Stoeckle Houses in Berlin. In her classes she met Hinnerk Scheper, a journeyman painter who had passed his master craftsman’s examination in 1922; the two were married on Christmas Eve that same year. She dropped out of the Bauhaus temporarily in late 1923 to give birth to their first son, Jan Gisbert and returned to live in her parents’ home in Wesel, from where she would send her husband elaborate illustrated letters, in which she combined calligraphic elements and illustrated vignettes.
With her husband’s appointment as director of the wall-painting workshop in the newly constructed Bauhaus, the family moved first into a Dessau apartment and then settled into the Muches’s Master’s House in 1927. Although their second child had since been born, a daughter named Britta, Scheper-Berkenkamp once again enrolled as a student, this time in Oskar Schlemmer’s theater workshop, designing sets and costumes and also performing in productions. She took part in the group exhibition Junge Bauhausmaler (Young Bauhaus Painters) in Halle (Saale) in 1928. In the summer of 1929, she moved to Moscow with her husband, who had been granted sabbatical leave from the Bauhaus to establish a state office of design and a central advisory service on color in architecture. During her year in Moscow, she supported Scheper in his work and also wrote for the German-language weekly newspaper, the Moskauer Rundschau, and created sketches, such as those of “standard people of the male and female sexes.” During this year, both of their children were sent to live in a children’s home in Berchtesgaden until the family was reunited in Dessau in 1931. Soon thereafter they would witness the closing of the Bauhaus Dessau, its reopening in Berlin, and its final dissolution.
Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, illustrated letter to Hinnerk Scheper, 1925, ink and watercolour
No longer attached to the Bauhaus, Scheper-Berkenkamp and her husband took extensive trips and had considerable success selling their photographs to agencies. When Scheper was denied admission into the Reich’s Association of German Photojournalists (Reichsverband der Deutschen Bildberichterstatter) in 1934, however, this source of income dried up. From Berlin, he accepted commissions for exposition stands, murals, and color designs; his wife only occasionally worked as an artist, focusing instead on raising their second son Dirk, born in 1938. In the last years of the war, she began creating hand-painted children’s books that were later published by Ernst Wunderlich’s publishing house in Leipzig; unfortunately, they were unsuccessful. She began focusing more on painting and became increasingly involved in the artists organizations, first as a member of the Zehlendorf Art Council (Kunstbeirat), then in the Professional Association of Visual Artists (Berufsverband Bildender Künstler), and in 1951, as a founding member of the artists’ collective Der Ring (“The Ring”) in Berlin.
Her life changed again with the death of Scheper in 1957, and she returned to her Bauhaus roots accepting commissions as a consultant on color design and participating in several large-scale projects. These included the design of Nuremberg’s Germanic National Museum (Germanisches Nationalmuseum), the Berlin Philharmonic, and Berlin Tegel Airport. Even at seventy-five, her unexpected death interrupted her in the middle of a project, the color design of Hans Scharoun’s National Library in Berlin.