Lilly Reich

Lilly Reich (front) and Annemarie Wilke during an outing with former students of the Bauhaus, Berlin, 1933

Born: June 16, 1885, Berlin, Germany

Died: December 14, 1947, Berlin, Germany

Employed: 1932

Locations: Germany, USA, Austria

The question seems strange today: could the Bauhaus continue under the Nazi regime? Lilly Reich, then the partner of the last Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and ultimately the only woman on the Bauhaus Council of Masters thought so just as Wassily Kandinsky did. History tells us that nothing came of the idea. Nevertheless, from that point on and in light of various activities that are at least indirectly associated with Nazi propaganda, the question of Reich’s stance on the fascist state arose repeatedly. Unlike Mies van der Rohe, Reich did not sign a controversial proclamation (Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden) in 1934, in which many of Germany’s artistic elite declared their loyalty to Hitler. However, in 1933, she approved of the Nazification (Gleichschaltung) of the Deutscher Werkbund and in the following years frequently and prominently participated in the regime’s propaganda exhibitions.

Yet Reich’s merits as a progressive designer are undisputed; in 1920, she became the first female board member of the Deutscher Werkbund, after having achieved success as an interior designer even before the First World War. Trained by Josef Hoffmann in the Vienna Workshops (Wiener Werkstätte), she had founded her studio for interior design, decorative art, and fashion in Berlin in 1911. With her friends Hermann and Anna Muthesius, Reich advanced contemporary living in the atmosphere of aesthetic revolution that pervaded the final years of the German Empire. After the war, she went on educational trips with New Objectivity architect Ferdinand Kramer and, in 1924, opened a studio in Frankfurt taking part in exhibitions for the local trade fair office. In this role, she was also represented in the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, Die Wohnung (The Apartment), under the direction of Mies van der Rohe; she received lucrative subsequent commissions and moved back to Berlin. Reich also played an active role in the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair and the 1931 Deutsche Bauausstellung (German Building Exhibition). It is now generally believed that she was at least involved in the conception of several classic designs attributed to Mies van der Rohe, including the Barcelona Chair, since many of her designs for steel-pipe furniture have survived.

With Mies van der Rohe’s appointment as Bauhaus director in 1930, it seemed inevitable that his highly-qualified partner would also join the faculty. In January 1932, she became director of the interior design department and weaving workshop—a change that did not go without comment by the students, who believed she had ousted their beloved, Otti Berger. Not a trained weaver herself, Reich shifted the teaching objective toward designing patterns for printed fabrics, which was in line with the school’s new direction under Mies van der Rohe. Although Reich rejected prestigious opportunities including an offer to direct the present-day German Master School of Fashion in Munich, to some, she was always just the director’s partner. The director of the wall-painting workshop, Hinnerk Scheper, described Reich as a “cold, cunning woman” without empathy for others; an assessment made, however, in an argument with Reich over his own future at the financially and politically struggling Bauhaus. Since the metal, furniture, and wall-painting workshops all belonged to the interior design department, Reich was his immediate supervisor.

Lilly Reich, Unterwäsche (Undergarments) c. 1922

Lilly Reich, chair design, c. 1931

Later, her elegant and well-engineered designs were welcomed in Nazi Germany, which is why, in 1934, she was placed in charge of the glass, ceramic, and porcelain section of the propaganda exhibition Deutsches Volk—Deutsche Arbeit (German People—German Work). Together with Mies van der Rohe, from whom she personally separated in the mid-1930s, she designed plans for large-scale textile exhibitions in Berlin and Paris, but demand for their services fell considerably in the late 1930s. After visiting Mies van der Rohe in exile in Chicago, she once again returned to Germany in 1939. According to her own account, this was in both of their interests, to defend their shared copyrights. During the war, she was employed by former Bauhaus student Ernst Neufert—Albert Speer’s standardization officer—after her own studio had been destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943. Reich died shortly after the end of the war, but not before helping to initiate the re-founding of the Deutscher Werkbund.