Margaretha Reichardt

Margaretha Reichardt at the weaving loom with third-year apprentice Burgel Seifert, 1956

Born: March 6, 1907, Erfurt, Germany

Died: May 25, 1984, Erfurt-Bischleben, Germany

Matriculated: 1926

Locations: Germany, Netherlands

Very few Bauhaus graduates were lauded more in their later careers: the Good Form Award at the Leipzig Trade Fairs, the Honorary Certificate from the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Ministry of Culture, and the J.R. Becher Gold Medal from the Cultural Association of the GDR are just three of the accolades bestowed on Margaretha—“Grete”—Reichardt for her woven works after she had left the Bauhaus. And she received these honors despite her time at the Bauhaus, not because of it—in the cultural politics of the GDR, the art school was not well regarded. After leaving the Bauhaus, Reichardt chose to develop her own individual body of work, dedicated to the ideal of craftsmanship, rather than to perpetuate the school’s ideal of functional creations intended for mass production and industrial applications. It was not until the end of her life that she returned to her roots and began reproducing and reflecting on her old Bauhaus creations.

At fourteen, Reichardt enrolled in the School of Applied Arts (Staatlich-Städtische Handwerker-und Kunstgewerbeschule) in her hometown of Erfurt, where she completed a four-year study course. While on a class trip in 1923, she visited the first Bauhaus exhibition in the neighboring city of Weimar, which, as Rainer Behrends explains in his biography of her, must have left a lasting impression. After graduating, she applied to the Bauhaus in Weimar, but did not commence her studies until 1926, and at its new location in Dessau. Reichardt took the preliminary course (Vorkurs) with Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy and then classes from Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joost Schmidt. She specialized in weaving under Gunta Stölzl, who had taken over the weaving workshop in the spring of 1927. Later, Reichardt was one of the students who spoke openly against the school’s only female instructor; Reichardt and the others were expelled by the Masters’ Council but through a decision by Dessau’s Lord Mayor, Fritz Hesse (who bent to right-wing pressure from the Dessau City Council) were reinstated.

In class, she experimented with various yarns and fabrics like those she combined in the fabric collage Gretelstoffe (Gretel Fabrics). Using Eisengarn—literally “iron yarn,” the trade name for a type of reflective cotton thread invented in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century—she wove robust and stable bands, which Marcel Breuer used to create the back, seat, and arm rests for his tubular steel furniture. In the 1930s, she developed fabrics that were used for upholstering airplane seats made by Junkers Dessau. In addition, she developed fabrics with sound absorbing and reflective properties, and designed graphic woven and knitted tapestries as well as participated in large-scale Bauhaus projects, such as the furnishing of the Trade Union School (ADGB) in Bernau by Berlin and the Opera Café in Dessau. After passing her journeyman’s examination (Gesellenprüfung) at the Anhalt Chamber of Commerce in Dessau, she spent her practical semester (Außensemester) with Lena Meyer-Bergner in Königsberg, East Prussia, where the former Bauhaus member Ruth Hollós-Consemüller—who gave Reichardt a place to stay—oversaw the weaving workshop of a home-worker’s union.

Margaretha Reichardt, “Church Spire” inlay on woven fabric, c. 1926–1931

Upon her return, Reichardt spent two more semesters as a master weaver in the Bauhaus workshop before she received her Bauhaus Diploma in textile design, which stated that: “In view of the work she had already done—she was not required to submit a diploma project.” Reichardt then spent time in The Hague, where she established a weaving workshop for the artist Sophia Gemmeken, and studied typography under Piet Zwart. In 1932, Reichardt returned to Dessau and attended Kandinsky’s painting classes as a guest student. She decided to open a weaving workshop and, in 1933, moved back to Erfurt, where she established her own hand-weaving studio—Handweberei Grete Reichardt—using two looms she purchased from the Dessau Bauhaus when it was shut down. In the more than fifty years that she ran her own business, participated in trade shows, was awarded prizes and medals, and—even in old age—trained apprentices and master weavers, most of her creative work lay in designing and producing materials for everyday use and decorative fabrics, including clothing material and home textiles for curtains and tablecloths, upholstery fabric, and souvenirs. Her fabrics were characterized by a consistent high quality but were almost never selected for industrial production.

Margaretha—“Grete”—Reichardt’s signet “gr” on the cover of a workshop brochure designed by Siegfried Kraft, 1962

The second outlet for her artistry was her pictorial tapestries (Tapisserien), mostly designed directly at the loom, without a pattern and usually with her monogram “gr.” She was particularly interested in gardens and nature, literature and music—all elements that influenced her woven art works, which included knotted rugs and free-form, Fadenspiele series works. From 1936, her membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer)—a government agency with compulsory membership for all German creative artists—allowed her to participate in many applied-art exhibitions, including those held at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, where, for decades, she had a stand to advertise her products. At the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, Reichardt won an honorary certificate; two years later, her designs for industrial textiles were awarded a gold medal at the Milan Triennial. In 1939, she and her husband—former weaving student, Hans Wagner (whom she had married three years earlier)—had a house and workshop built by Alfred Arndt’s Probstzella architectural firm, in the so-called “Heimatschutz” style—a vernacular architectural movement in Germany, popular in the first half of the twentieth century. Erected in Erfurt-Bischleben, the home was inspired by Reichardt’s ideas and based on a preliminary design that the Bauhäusler Friedrich Konrad Püschel had drawn up as a blueprint in 1937 or 1938. In 1942, in the midst of the chaos of war, Reichardt passed her master craftsman’s examination (Meisterprüfung) in hand weaving.

After the war ended, Reichardt continued running her private workshop and was among the twenty-two Bauhäusler whose work Hubert Hoffmann gathered for the first influential exhibition in West Berlin in 1949, which played a significant role in keeping the Bauhaus idea alive. In 1952, she divorced her husband, who had been working with her in their shared workshop, and from then on ran the workshop alone. In 1953, she was offered a teaching position at the state art school in Hamburg (Landeskunstschule), but declined it. Instead, for the rest of her life, she trained numerous weavers and created countless figurative tapestries, some of which were official, high-profile commissions. A highlight of her later career was, without question, a series of wall hangings she created based on the theme of the “Faustian man” for the German National Theater in Weimar between 1978 and 1980. Around the same time—in a remarkable act of memory recall—she revived her motifs from her Bauhaus days and wove reproductions of her earlier designs; she also took this return to her earlier works as an opportunity to reflect on her Bauhaus past through contemporary designs. Beginning in the 1970s, Reichardt supported the GDR’s new efforts in the area of cultural politics, guided by a policy of “breadth and variety,” to preserve the memory of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, and was invited to many official events, which helped restore the institution in the public eye.

Margaretha Reichardt, Terra, detail from the tapestry cycle Der faustische Mensch for the National Theater Weimar, 1979–1980