Gertrud Arndt

Gertrud Arndt, “Maskenphoto” (“mask photo”) No. 37, c. 1930. From a series of costumed self-portraits first publicly exhibited only in 1979

Born: Gertrud Hantschk, September 20, 1903, Ratibor, Upper Silesia, Germany (now Raciborz, Poland)

Died: July 10, 2000, Darmstadt, Germany

Matriculated: 1923

Locations: Poland, Germany

Gertrud Arndt was only active as an artist for roughly a dozen years of her life—a mere fraction of the near century she witnessed. Yet in this relatively short period, she created some of the most impressive student works to come out of the Bauhaus: rigid geometric designs for textiles and upholstery fabrics and a series of self-portraits in costumes never actually intended for public display. That she left her undisputed talent unexpressed after starting a family was Arndt’s personal choice and might have been a consequence of her being denied a career in architecture, the subject she originally hoped to study at the Bauhaus.

Born Gertrud Hantschk in the Upper-Silesian town of Ratibor (today, Racibórz, Poland), she moved with her family several times before they settled in Erfurt in 1916. The following year, she finished school at fourteen and, like so many in her generation, set out in search of freedom beyond that which had shaped her parents’ lives—a path many saw as having led to the catastrophe of world war. As Christian Wolsdorff explains in his biographical essay of Arndt, she joined the nature-oriented romantic youth movement the Wandervogelbewegung and rebelled against bourgeois conventions: she cut off her braids, expressed interest in becoming vegetarian, and officially left the Catholic Church. Her dream of becoming an architect was also against the grain of established gender roles of the time.

The architect Karl Meinhardt, a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, offered the rebellious young woman an apprenticeship in Erfurt; while this primarily entailed office work typical for designers and architectural draftsmen, including calculating materials and costs and dealing with correspondence, she also worked on interior architectural designs. In addition she took photographs of the city’s topography on behalf of Meinhardt. While the book for which they were intended was never published and the photos have been lost, the young Hantschk welcomed the project as an opportunity to teach herself photographic techniques and to develop film in a darkroom. Furthermore, Hantschk took drawing classes at the Erfurt School of Applied Arts, while under Meinhardt’s apprenticeship.

A decisive turning point for the then twenty-year-old was her involvement in Meinhardt’s construction of the private home of Walter Kaesbach, who was the director of Erfurt’s municipal museum (today, the Angermuseum). As works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger were exhibited there under his direction, it was no surprise that he recommended the ambitious and talented apprentice to the Bauhaus. Meinhardt himself attested to her sense of rhythm, “good feel for form and color,” and “quick wit”; consequently, she received a scholarship from the city of Erfurt and began her studies there in the preliminary course (Vorkurs) in the fall of 1923. The teachings with Klee and Kandinsky—particularly because of how greatly they differed from each other—made a lasting impression on her.

Walter Gropius’s office at the Weimar Bauhaus c. 1923–1925; in the foreground a carpet by Gertrud Arndt, 1924. Photograph by Lucia Moholy

She then attended Adolf Meyer’s technical drawing course (Werkzeichnen), considered the next step for students studying architecture, which had not yet become a formalized program at the Bauhaus. After her intensive training under Meinhardt, the course seems to have had little to offer her, and it is unlikely she felt very comfortable as the only woman in attendance. In any case, Georg Muche’s suggestion that one of her exercises for the preliminary course would make an ideal rug design was the deciding factor that led her to transfer to the weaving workshop. Hantschk—who admitted to never having been particularly fond of textile work (“all those threads!”)—signed an apprenticeship contract that allowed her to remain in the liberating atmosphere of the Bauhaus for three more years. She opted to follow the school to Dessau and, in 1927, passed her journeyman’s examination administered by the Weavers’ Guild in Glauchau, Saxony.

In Weimar, she quickly became proficient in rug knotting; her first piece was sold at the Bauhaus sales exhibition in Dessau in 1926, and her second would eventually be used to decorate director Walter Gropius’s office in Weimar, a considerable achievement for a student. Further, both works were shown in color in the Bauhaus book Neue Arbeiten der Bauhaus Werkstätten (New Works from the Bauhaus Workshops), which is why, in 1926, Hantschk could certainly have been described as the school’s most significant rug designer. As Wolsdorff explicitly shows, such commissions were a lucrative business, particularly compared to the rest of the Bauhaus’s products, which were not always successful. Equally as promising were her woven works in which she exploited the artistic freedom the director of the workshop, Muche, who some criticized, granted his favorites. Her surviving textiles for wall hangings, tablecloths, curtains, clothing, and upholstery exhibit craftsmanship and a competent use of color and pattern.

It is all the more surprising that, on the day of her journeyman’s exam in 1927, Hantschk decided never to sit at a loom again. On November 27, 1927, she married the architect and Bauhaus graduate Alfred Arndt. The couple left the Bauhaus and moved to Probstzella, where her husband was overseeing the construction of the Haus des Volkes (House of the People), by then structurally complete and a commission that made their marriage financially possible in the first place. It is in keeping with the couple’s unconventionality that there is no “official” wedding photo, but rather a photo of the closing of her studio in the Prellerhaus in Dessau. A week before their wedding, the bride and groom drew up a “prenuptial agreement” in collage form, in which both promise—tongue-in-cheek—to remain athletic. Upon his wife’s request, Arndt was also supposed to smoke less and put the savings in a travel fund to be spent on joint vacations. But the first requirement she lists for a “perfect marriage” is “full equality between man and wife.”

Gertrud Arndt, preliminary drawing for a wall hanging in red tones, c. 1926, watercolor and ink over pencil on paper

The couple’s nonconformity, however, was not reflected in the rest of Gertrud Arndt’s life, at least artistically and professionally. After returning to Dessau, where Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer had appointed her husband head of the interior design workshop (including the metal, wood, and wall-painting workshops) Arndt characterized herself as a “do-nothing” compared to the other masters’ wives. Out of boredom, she returned to her old hobby of photography. With the camera she had bought in 1926 she photographed objects, shot portraits of her friend Otti Berger, and most notably, took the series of forty-three costumed self-portraits she would later refer to as Maskenphotos (“mask photos”).

Marriage contract between Gertrud and Alfred Arndt, Dessau, November 20, 1927, collage on paper

With the birth of her daughter, Alexandra, in 1931, followed by that of her son, Hugo, in 1938, her work as a photographer, also came to an end. In the spring of 1933, after the closing of the Bauhaus, the Arndt family moved back to Probstzella, in the Thuringian countryside, where Alfred had a difficult time as an architect in a small town and where Gertrud, in addition to keeping house and raising the children, worked as an assistant in her husband’s office, thereby returning to what she had learned working for Meinhardt in Erfurt. Other than pieces she created for their family home, Arndt abandoned all efforts to fulfil her artistic potential. A closer reading of the couple’s prenuptial agreement reveals that this had, in fact, been foreshadowed in the telling line: “The greatest happiness / the greatest joy / lies in cozy domesticity.” While the family’s relocation from the Soviet-occupied zone to Darmstadt in 1948 meant making yet another new start, it also reunited them with some of their old Bauhaus friends. After Alfred Arndt’s death in 1976, not only was his wife rediscovered as a photographer, but one of her designs was selected for serial production by the German carpet company Vorwerk for its “Classic” collection, launched in 1994.