Born: Margit Vries, 1897, Frankfurt, Germany
Died: July 17, 1973 Newtown, Pennsylvania, USA
Matriculated: 1927
Locations: Germany, Belgium, Italy, UK, USA, Switzerland
Artist Grit Kallin-Fischer excelled in many media, but her photographs stand out the most. With their dynamic compositions, she fulfilled her teacher László Moholy-Nagy’s call to break away from tired pictorial conventions and to use new technologies to “establish … new relationships” to the visible world. Kallin-Fischer’s life matched her unconventional art, despite the fact that her social class origins were, as her fellow student Werner David Feist later recalled, among the “well-to-do.” In his Bauhaus memoirs, Feist wrote: “The Bauhaus, being considered eccentric, had snob appeal for a few. There was, for instance, a mature lady of great world charm, for whom attending the Bauhaus and meeting its famous stars probably meant an additional shade of sophistication … Albers seemed to be attracted by her.”
Margit Vries grew up in Frankfurt am Main and in 1910, at the age of thirteen, moved to Belgium to attend boarding school and begin her art training. In an exasperated letter to her mother, she wrote that she was tired of painting landscapes and flower still-lifes: “As you know, all I am interested in is portraiture and the human form.” The following year she continued studying painting first in Marburg and then at Leipzig’s art academy (Kunstakademie) with famed Impressionist Lovis Corinth. After the First World War, she moved to Berlin, where she met musician and Russian exile Marik Kallin. The pair married and moved to London in 1920, where Grit Kallin would remain for six years. After they separated in 1926—their divorce would only be finalized in 1933—she returned to Germany. In the fall of 1927, she matriculated into the Bauhaus with student identification number 233. Her studies included Josef Albers’s preliminary course, painting and analytical drawing with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, a brief specialization in the metal workshop under Moholy-Nagy’s direction, and a more fruitful period in the theater workshop with Oskar Schlemmer. Photography was something else she picked up at the Bauhaus, and this medium distilled her talents and years of training to pictorial perfection.
Kallin’s fresh and original portrait studies of fellow Bauhaus members typify Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision approach but make it her own. She took dynamic photographs of the women and men around her, including a series of her compatriot in the theater workshop, the painter, dancer, and performer Alfredo Bortoluzzi—nicknamed Freddo—in which he appears in a variety of modern guises. One shows him with only the most minimal circle of whiteface to turn him into a melancholy, modernist clown. With his downcast face and faraway look, Freddo seems unaware of the viewer’s gaze as it takes in his well-formed, nude upper body; this gaze parallels the photographer’s own look, which was not immune to male beauty. Kallin also photographed her future second husband, American Bauhaus member Edward Fischer.
After returning to Berlin with Fischer—likely late in 1928 or the spring of 1929—Kallin continued making art and photographs. According to Gebrauchsgraphik’s editor Hermann Karl Frenzel, Kallin’s work unites the strengths of the ideal photographer with those of the modern artist. Her photographs traveled to New York along with those of Herbert Bayer and Moholy-Nagy for a 1931 exhibition at the art center on 56th Street in Manhattan, which the New York Times called, “the first comprehensive collection of European commercial photographs in this country.”
Kallin and Fischer married in 1934 and moved to New York City. Their circle included many Bauhaus members, and, in the later 1930s, the Fischers moved to Newtown, Pennsylvania, to a house designed just for them—by their friends Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. After the war, Grit Kallin-Fischer no longer made photographs. Instead, she devoted herself to sculpture and traveled to Europe to pursue it on extended stays in Switzerland and Italy, with, among others, Marino Marini. She also returned frequently to Germany but lived out her days in her adopted home of the United States of America.
Grit Kallin-Fischer, portrait of Alfredo “Freddo” Bortoluzzi, 1930