Born: Bella Ullmann, March 2, 1905, Nuremberg, Germany
Died: December 7, 1993, Stuttgart, Germany
Matriculated: 1929
Locations: Germany, Palestine, USA, France
Monica Bella Ullmann-Broner seems to have been uninterested in leaving behind a seamless and flawless life story for posterity. For example, a work on the Bauhaus published during her lifetime, 50 Years Bauhaus (1968), she supplied the authors with an incorrect version of her own name and a birth year, 1911, that reduced her age by six years. She used numerous aliases and changed romantic partners and places of residence sometimes on a yearly basis, obscuring a clear view of an independent but erratic artist whose work has yet to be fully discovered. For decades, the majority of published biographies have relied on her own accounts, compiled for the Bauhaus Archive. But significant detective work over the past three years has made it possible to reassemble the puzzle pieces of her life. Despite Ullmann-Broner’s indisputable significance, many questions about her life and work remain unanswered. Ultimately, her case is further evidence that the legacies of female artists, particularly those without children, are far less frequently preserved than those of their male colleagues.
According to her registration card in the Nuremberg City Archives, she was born as Bella Ullmann in Nuremberg on March 2, 1905 to an assimilated Jewish family of hop merchants. As an upper-class daughter her future initially seemed predetermined. But as a young woman she developed clear artistic ambitions and was fascinated by progressive educational ideas. Her parents afforded her a well-rounded education, made easier by an international network, initially through family but later through numerous artistic contacts across continents. Around 1926, Ullmann first studied at the Loheland School, an artists’ commune founded near Fulda in 1919, the same year as the Bauhaus. The holistic approach of its two founders, Hedwig von Rohden and Louise Langgaard was based in part on the theories of Rudolf Steiner; it comprised education in handicrafts and art as well as gymnastics and farming. The renown of the Loheland School attracted many, including Lucia Mohohly and László Moholy-Nagy prior to their time at the Bauhaus.
Like the majority of female students, Ullmann had professional experience before joining the Bauhaus. From 1927 to 1929, she lived in Hildesheim, where she likely trained as a handicrafts teacher before transferring to the Dessau Bauhaus. She enrolled for the 1929–1930 winter semester under the matriculation number 394, and the course of her studies can be traced through papers in the Bauhaus Archive. Her notes and exercises from the preliminary courses—“color theory,” taught by Josef Albers, and “analytical drawing” with Wassily Kandinsky—are frequently quoted, especially on the topic of color. Additionally, Ullmann attended courses by Hinnerk Scheper, Joost Schmidt, and the photographer Walter Peterhans. In 1930 she posed as a women’s rights campaigner in an eponymous montage Kämpferin für Frauenrechte by fellow student and German Communist Party (KPD) member Max Gebhard. A year later, it was published as the catalogue cover for the Bauhaus Dessau 1928–1930 exhibition in Moscow.
Bella Ullmann-Broner, motion study, from Josef Albers’s preliminary course, 1929–1930
Bella Ullman-Broner poses as a women’s rights campaigner, 1930 in Kämpferin für Frauenrechte by Max Gebhard. It was later used as the cover of the exhibition catalogue Bauhaus Dessau 1928–1930, Moscow, 1931.
Ullmann’s studies were as diverse as her interests. She likely studied wall painting with Scheper and illustration with Schmidt, practicing both techniques intermittently in her professional life later. Architectural designs for a weekend house from 1929 have also survived. As was true for many of her female classmates, despite her ambitions, she ended up in the Bauhaus textile workshop where it appears that she helped to create industrial designs under Gunta Stölzl’s direction. Although ultimately dismissed from the school for political reasons in 1930, Stölzl was supported by Ullmann, and by Otti Berger who both asserted their faith in Stölzl when she faced criticism from others. They remained in contact with each other years after Ullmann graduated and in the 1950s, now going by the name Bella Ullman-Broner (following her marriage to Erwin Broner), she regularly visited Stölzl in Zurich and even organized an exhibition of her works in Stuttgart in 1977.
As a “half-Jew” (Halbjüdin) during Nazi oppression, Ullmann found her life threatened. Her mother tried to emigrate from Germany with her and all six of her siblings and some of the family found refuge in the United States of America in 1936. As for Bella, she went to Palestine, where, from 1937 to 1938, she worked with Stölzl’s ex-husband, the former Bauhaus student and architect Arieh Sharon, possibly collaborating on his designs for cooperative housing in Tel Aviv. Little is known about the nature of her relationship with Sharon; this is also the case with her earlier brief marriage to civil engineer Karl Ernst Rosenthal, which was celebrated in Munich in 1933 and dissolved in 1938. She may even have immigrated with Rosenthal to Palestine as early as 1933, after an attempted escape via Rotterdam that same year had failed. Unlike with Erwin Broner, she did not take Rosenthal’s name.
Her wedding to Broner, who had been married once before, took place in Palestine. They shared an artistic approach that spanned many disciplines, and until their divorce in 1948, they spent much of their lives together. Erwin had studied painting at the art academies in Munich, Dresden, and Stuttgart and was influenced by his teacher Hans Hoffmann. As an architect, Erwin benefited from his deep knowledge of the Weissenhof housing estate, erected for a Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927. In 1938, the couple settled in Los Angeles, where he worked as a cameraman and architect, and she as a set designer for films. While applying for American citizenship in 1944, Bella simplified her last name to Broner. Finally, in 1948, they moved to Krumville, New York, where Bella’s family had owned the farm Beaver Lake House, also known as Ullmann’s Farm, since 1941, and where she then set up a guest house. It became a meeting place for celebrities including Marc Chagall, Nahum Goldmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Kurt Blumenfeld. But Krumville did not bring Bella happiness; in this social hub for predominantly Jewish immigrants, Erwin met his third and final wife, Gisela.
Group photograph with Bella Ullmann, 1929–1930. From left to right: Wera Meyer-Waldeck, Margarete Dambeck, Otti Berger, Bella Ullmann-Broner, and Gertrud Preiswerk (Dirks)
After the Second World War, Broner briefly moved back to Europe, living in Paris from 1947 to 1949. This was prompted by her work as a stills photographer on the French musical film Alice in Wonderland (1951), which premiered the same year as Walt Disney’s far better-known adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale and is considered an artistic and unconventional sleeper hit to this day. On returning to the USA, Broner, who later added “Monica” to her first name as an artist, worked in the South as a textile industry stylist and later as a children’s book illustrator in New York. Surviving designs for a 1958 children’s book show the influence of Pablo Picasso while her textile work has been shown alongside that of Picasso and Marc Chagall in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1956 exhibit Textiles USA; Anni Albers, a former Bauhaus classmate of Ullmann, served on the jury. This comprehensive exhibition is still seen as a landmark in presenting exclusively American-made textiles. Broner’s contribution, a 1954 hand-woven, wool and cotton wall hanging with strips of fur, was exhibited in the “home furnishings” section. With the help of Tut Schlemmer, Oskar Schlemmer’s widow, and Max Bill, Broner returned to Germany in order to attend the major anniversary exhibition 50 Years Bauhaus, presented by the Württemberg Art Society in Stuttgart in 1968. She was represented with a blanket designed in 1933 and upholstery fabrics that had been manufactured in 1966 by the American textile firm Neisler Mills in Kings Mountain, North Carolina.
Using accounts from contemporaries, literary scholar Ulrike Müller concluded that after returning to Stuttgart, Broner was no longer artistically active. Instead, she supported herself, partly through sales from her Bauhaus portfolio. While she lived in an artist’s studio, she spent her time together with Tut Schlemmer and her former classmate Gertrud Arndt as a Bauhaus representative in southwestern Germany. In the 1970s, she traveled the country with the first director of the Bauhaus Archive, Peter Hahn, searching out estates and archives. Additionally, she promoted the work of the artist Richard Lindner, a contemporary raised in Nuremberg, who, as a Jew, had also immigrated to the USA in 1941. She was likely all the more surprised when, in the early 1990s, she was approached by carpet manufacturer Vorwerk: two of her designs were to be manufactured for “Classic: Frauen am Bauhaus” (“Classic: Women at the Bauhaus”), a collection of serially produced original designs that had not yet been made. In Vorwerk’s company archive, photographs show the elderly artist inspecting swatches. The rug with the design number 2434/6 is still in production as a foulard print. It exhibits design principles characteristic of Broner’s entire oeuvre: the rigorous geometric forms imparted at the Bauhaus are softly modeled and varied through the use of color contrasts. When Ullmann-Broner died in Stuttgart in 1993, the newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung bestowed on her the honorary title: Die Bauhausdame (“Bauhaus lady”).
Bella Ullmann-Broner with one of her designs at Vorwerk, early 1990s
Bella Ullmann-Broner carpet sample, Vorwerk, design no. 2434/6