Born: December 26, 1907, Dublin, Ireland
Died: July 21, 1987, London, UK
Matriculated: 1931
Locations: Ireland, France, Germany, UK
The only Irish Bauhaus member, Stella Steyn attended the school during its tumultuous 1931-1932 academic year. In the late 1920s, she was already a successful painter in Paris who had published illustrations for James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and had an affair with fellow Dubliner Samuel Beckett. Still in her early twenties, Steyn was drawn to seek a new challenge and applied to the Bauhaus, by then the most famous art school in Europe. She was admitted and took up her studies in July 1931. With her first semester in Josef Albers’s preliminary course (Vorkurs), she cast aside her fanciful fauvism in favor of the school’s constructivism and its privileging of ideas and reproducibility over the emotionladen trace of the artist’s hand. She completed a series of pictures with colorful stamped, readymade elements that evoke the industrial through play.
A collage by Steyn relies on a fully Bauhaus approach to graphic design; dynamic and foreshortened, the composition employs only a few bold elements—ground, tram, tracks, and driver—to convey the modern efficiency of interwar city transport. Yet Steyn also brings in contemporaneous elements of British Art Deco commercial graphics. The driver’s jaunty cap is perched above a concentrated face that Steyn calls up with just a few quick lines; she thus evokes him as a fleeting glimpse as the tram careens through the city.
The year Steyn spent at the Bauhaus was one of the institution’s most electric, but it was also the end of the Dessau period. The Bauhaus’s third and last director, Mies van der Rohe, was unable to save the school from local Nazis, who saw it as a bastion of foreign influence and un-German morals. When the Nazi Party won Dessau’s 1932 elections, one of their first orders of business was to kick the Bauhaus out of town. Steyn left as well and departed Germany for good. She would later renounce her Bauhaus period and call it “a false move, apart from the interest of the political scene in Germany at that time and the effect of turning me permanently to the painting which had its roots in tradition.”
During her subsequent travels, she encountered fellow Bauhaus member Grete Stern—one half of the photographic duo ringl + pit—who created a stunning portrait of Steyn when they met up again in London in 1934. Stern has captured Steyn reclining amidst a sea of rich textures with her eyes hauntingly half closed so that she appears both passive and alert. Styled to perfection, Steyn is a surrealist beauty frozen at a moment when the Continent’s cosmopolitan and experimental culture was being uprooted and cast adrift by looming fascism.
Stella Steyn, Tramway, c. 1931–1932, collage on paper