Born: Hortense Lore Leudesdorff, August 16, 1902, Elberfeld, Germany
Died: August 26, 1986, Berlin, Germany
Matriculated: 1921
Locations: Germany
What an ironic and tragic twist of fate: years after her eyes were immortalized by the popular Berlin photojournalist Umbo (Otto Umbehr) in the 1920s, the former Bauhaus student Lore Leudesdorff was robbed of the use of her most important sensory organ. But even after the loss of her eyesight, she remained active as an artist, creating etchings and bronzes, whose spatiality she could feel. Prior to this, she had begun a career as a textile designer and had successfully made the transition to the industrial professional practice promoted by the Bauhaus. Yet Leudesdorff—despite the fact that Walter Gropius later described her as “one of the original pillars of the Bauhaus”—is largely passed over in the classical reception of the Bauhaus because so few of her works survived and her oeuvre is rather unusual.
Hortense Lore Leudesdorff was born into a wealthy merchant family from Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, who experienced social and financial decline after the early death of her father in 1908. It was only by marrying a second time that her mother was able to regain the family’s accustomed standard of living, but not before Leudesdorff and her sister Senta were forced to spend several years in a Cologne children’s home. Her stepfather, August Engstfeld, general manager of the Essen Coal Mine, took the two children in. Leudesdorff attended the public girls’ school in Essen, but left in 1920 without earning her high school diploma (Abitur). Even before going blind, she temporarily lost her eyesight for about a week, most likely as the result of a case of measles and a vitamin A deficiency—not uncommon during the deprivation of the war years. She found friends in the Christian wing of the youth movement around Johannes Lilje, who, after the war, served as the regional bishop of Hannover, and Adolf Grimme, the later minister of culture of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and director of Northwest German Broadcasting (NWDR).
After a short stint at the Elberfeld School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule), Leudesdorff moved to Darmstadt in 1921, interested in studying at the city’s technical university. Though she was not accepted because she lacked her Abitur, she may have been introduced here to the idea of studying at the Bauhaus by her next-door neighbor, architect Adolf Metus Schwindt. A member of the German Werkbund, a state-sponsored art movement that had been established in 1907 to reform architecture and the arts, Schwindt was most certainly aware of the school thanks to Gropius’s promotion. At the Bauhaus, aptitude was assessed not on the basis of a high school diploma but by the Council of Masters. Since Leudesdorff had been painting since she was a child, she was able to enroll at the Bauhaus Weimar for the 1921–1922 fall term and attend the preliminary course (Vorkurs) taught by Johannes Itten. In a meeting on April 5, 1922, the Council of Masters acknowledged that she had successfully completed the course, at which point she was accepted into the textile workshop, as was common for women at the time.
Lore Leudesdorff, Schlitzgobelin (slit tapestry), 1923
Her first work on the high-warp loom was a small slit tapestry, which, with its constructive, functional design, achieved the harmonious combination of geometric forms favored in the early Bauhaus. Made as a weaving sample at the beginning of her training, this design already exhibited a thoughtful composition focused on the pattern’s construction and coloration, but it was less successful in its technical execution. Between 1922 and 1923, Leudesdorff also wove a large abstract wall hanging in light pastel colors, with color gradients reminiscent of the works of Paul Klee. She seems to have been particularly interested in his courses, as Leudesdorff’s name appears on the attendance lists of his lectures, and in October 1922, she signed a petition started by her friends asking Klee to continue offering his regular weekly class during the coming winter semester. Several of Leudesdorff’s shawls are depicted in the preserved Bauhaus albums, which provide photographic documentation of the workshops’ production. The fabric of these shawls could have served equally as curtain fabric or industrial designs, which suggests their simple and low-cost workmanship.
During her time at the Bauhaus, Leudesdorff also created various, as she described them, “abstract” etchings and developed a hybrid technique using watercolor, India ink, and charcoal, which, with its net-like motif, simultaneously incorporates the textile technique of filet lace knitting taught at the Bauhaus. In February 1923, Leudesdorff joined the Bauhaus’s advertising department, which was in full swing preparing the school’s first major exhibition, where, among other works, Leudesdorff’s slit tapestry and the aforementioned large wall hanging were to be prominently displayed. Accordingly, her name, along with those of the other teachers and students, was included on the postcard Kurt Schmidt designed for the occasion. Commercial art, however, was never one of Leudesdorff’s main interests; it is safe to assume that this engagement was primarily owed to her personal relationship with fellow student Herbert Bayer, with whom she was involved in a passionate affair. Whether he was in fact her first true love, as later maintained by her son in an attempted biography, can hardly be proven in retrospect. Nevertheless, she dedicated several longer passages to this liaison in her autobiographically-tinged novel, Unter dem weiten Himmel (Under the Big Sky), published in a small edition by the Bourg Verlag of Dusseldorf around 1970, in which Bayer appears under the name “Bruno”:
“I did these backgrounds in Prinz Achmed—most of them are mine—because Ruttmann had the ideas but couldn’t execute them.”
Lore Leudesdorff
When she closed her eyes, she saw Bruno’s face, very close, above her. His green eyes and black lashes, full lips and sparkling teeth. She dreamed her face into his hands. She dreamed her body nestled against his. She dreamed of being one with him. All feelings in her body and soul were focused only on him. Bruno! … Those were three wonderful years at Bauhaus—studying, the Bauhaus air, Bruno. We were completely there for each other.
In contrast to her novel, the real relationship with Bayer lasted only until the summer of 1923, when Bayer left on his year-long wandering apprenticeship through Italy after having recently met his future wife, Irene Hecht, with whom he maintained an intense correspondence. Hecht appears in Leudesdorff’s book as an overbearing Hungarian woman, who steals “Bruno” away on her first day at the Bauhaus—the reason Leudesdorff’s literary alter ego decides to leave Weimar.
Lobby card for Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis). Photomontage, 1927
In the fall of 1923, Leudesdorff did in fact interrupt her Bauhaus studies for a semester at the textile school in Krefeld—as Gunta Stölzl and Benita Otte had before her. This is most likely where she discovered her talent for dyeing and textile printing, which would later play an important role in her professional life. After a total of eight semesters, as documented by subsequent certificates, Leudesdorff left the Bauhaus somewhere between 1924 and 1925. She was not awarded a formal degree—normal for woman graduates of the textile workshop, for whom the local chamber of crafts did not offer an apprenticeship exam—but she did subsequently receive a “general professional degree” certified by Gropius.
Lore Leudesdorff and son René, 1930s. Photograph by Ré Soupault
Initially this degree did not play a major role in her life, because, in the fall of 1925, Leudesdorff moved to Berlin as the professional and romantic partner of the avant-garde filmmaker Walter Ruttmann. As studies of film history show, for three years, she was heavily involved in his productions; works which today are considered classics of the genre. These include the abstract play of shapes that opens Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 silhouette film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed)—the oldest surviving animated feature film; the abstract animations Opus III and Opus IV (1925); and the full-length 1927 classic documentary style film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis), as well as several hand-colored animated advertising films commissioned by producer Julius Pinschewer’s company. As she emphasized in an interview, she was particularly valued for her skill as a draftswoman: “Then I did these backgrounds in Prinz Achmed—most of them are mine—because Ruttmann had the ideas but couldn’t execute them.” Today, some innovations, such as the animation of text elements, are attributed to Leudesdorff, and even the organizational handling of the Berlin film, with its complex production process, seems to have been placed in her hands.
Artistically and aesthetically, the two were on the same wavelength, which is why the often unwell and poorly disciplined Ruttmann left increasingly more work to his partner. He did not, however, share the revenues with Leudesdorff, who was still supported by her family; her authorship was even deliberately left off the opening credits of their films. Her tremendous importance for the realization of Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, a milestone in film history, first became clear when, in May 1968, she gave a deposition in a lawsuit involving the role of Karl Freund, director of Fox-Europa Films in 1926 and 1927:
Ruttmann wrote the screenplay with me, a series of additions and improvements came from me alone…. Originally, due to my close collaboration with him, Ruttmann wanted me to also be mentioned in the film’s opening credits, because I had witnessed the creation of the film from the very beginning, through all of its phases and details, and, in particular, independently led the technical, organizational portion. I assisted Ruttmann in editing.
She later specified that she and Ruttmann had written the screenplay together; he had contributed the ideas but she had “accurately executed” it all, for which he lacked the patience. Her role, therefore, clearly surpassed that of a mere assistant, and, given the considerable responsibility she took on in her tasks critical to the production, she certainly deserved to have her name mentioned in the opening credits. Instead, Karl Freund is said to have demanded to be named as director alongside Ruttmann, and otherwise would have backed out of financing the film.
Lore Leudesdorff, drafts for textile prints, after 1945
After professionally and privately separating from Ruttmann, Leudesdorff was briefly involved with Jorge Fulda, owner of a Berlin photo studio, which resulted in the birth of a son, René, on February 18, 1928. That same year, Leudesdorff married the fabric wholesaler Martin Wiener and designed textile prints for his company, Haweco, before again deciding to separate in 1932 and going into business for herself with her own studio. Well into the post-Second World War years, she was one of the most sought-after creators of specialist textiles that—very much in the spirit of Bauhaus—were serially produced for the mass market; in terms of their design, however, they had very little to do with the Bauhaus’s formal approach. Her designs before the Second World War are considered lost; bombs decimated the archives of her most important customers and her own records were destroyed when her apartment was seized by American soldiers.
As a designer working during the National Socialist era, Leudesdorff was obliged to join the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste), with whose permission she taught numerous students textile printing design. But she was never a member of the Nazi Party. According to her son, she was divided in her personal stance on the regime: while she welcomed the successes of the new economic policies, she found any form of political violence repulsive. She did not participate in the organized resistance, but, because of her ethical and moral principles, she smuggled goods and assisted persecuted Jewish neighbors, even aiding their escape. She also made courier runs to Switzerland for a resistance group, one of whose members, an official at the German Red Cross, Leudesdorff knew.
Lore Leudesdorff with her guide dog, 1970s
At the same time, however, she had been married to the engineer Fritz Ribbentrop, a distant relative of the Nazi regime’s Foreign Minister, since September 1939, the first month of the war. At first, she was able to continue selling her textile designs, but, for nearly six months beginning in May 1940, she worked as a salesperson in the Gsellius bookstore in Berlin to avoid being forced into a war-work assignment. After voluntarily registering with the German Red Cross, Leudesdorff was also trained as a nurse’s aide and worked in various Berlin military hospitals, for which she was awarded the German War Merit Cross Second Class. After contracting an infection in a camp under quarantine for an outbreak of scarlet fever, she developed choroiditis, an infection of the eye’s vascular layer, which gradually led to blindness. By 1952, her vision had become so limited that she could no longer continue working as a designer. She reorganized her daily life and, to remain active as an artist, began working in techniques she could feel with her fingers. She dedicated herself to practices learned at Bauhaus, namely drypoint etching and casting bronze sculptures and reliefs, and these works were recognized in smaller exhibitions. In her final years, Leudesdorff primarily dedicated herself to keeping in touch with former Bauhaus members. After suffering two strokes, she died in August 1986 at home in Berlin.
Lore Leudesdorff, Basko (bronze casting, undated)