The Bauhaus is arguably the most influential art school that ever existed, one that sought to change the way that art is taught and to radically rethink art and design’s role in society. A century after its founding, the centrality of the Bauhaus’s women as students and teachers, and as artists and designers is still vastly misunderstood. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective sets out to rectify this inequity of history by presenting forty-five of the most important female Bauhäusler, as all Bauhaus members, whether students or teachers, were called. In addition to chronicling the lives and work of key female Bauhäusler, this book focuses particularly on those who connected the institute to the wider world.
Between 1919 and 1933, 462 women attended the Bauhaus in one of its three consecutive homes, Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. In other words, about one third of Bauhaus students were female, and the proportion remained fairly stable from 1919 to 1932. The Bauhaus was not alone as an art school that accepted female students. The constitution of Germany’s new Weimar Republic (1919–1933) enshrined their equality into law, and the period saw a marked tendency to foster women’s talents. The school was however somewhat exceptional in the degree to which modern male and female Bauhäusler intermingled in the workshops, the cafeteria, and the live-in studios in the “Prellerhaus” building adjacent to the classrooms, where some lucky students had rooms. This was an essential draw for young people all over the world who sought to lead their lives differently from their parents.
Weavers on the Bauhaus staircase, 1927. Top to bottom: Gunta Stölzl (left), Ljuba Monastirskaja (right), Grete Reichardt (left), Otti Berger (right), Elisabeth Müller (light patterned jumper), Rosa Berger (dark jumper), Lis Beyer-Volger (center, white collar), Lena Meyer-Bergner (left), Ruth Hollós (far right), and Elisabeth Oestreicher
With the founding of the Bauhaus coming directly after the First World War, its first generation of students and masters—as professors were called—had suffered through an armed conflict whose brutality was beyond compare; the subsequent years of the Weimar Republic provided challenging and shifting conditions for the institution and its members. The early Republic was profoundly shaped by Germany’s defeat after the First World War and the dramatic currency fluctuations that brought commerce nearly to a halt. During the mid-1920s, the country found a modicum of political and financial stability, the latter largely through foreign trade. But the October 1929 Wall Street stock market crash in the United States of America reverberated globally and had devastating consequences in Germany when the influx of foreign capital ceased. Layoffs began and rapid political polarization ensued. With hindsight, the rise of the Nazi Party is clearly the most terrifying outcome of this crisis, but many contemporaries were more concerned with the concurrent uptick in Communist Party membership, since the Soviet Union seemed the largest threat on the horizon.
The Bauhaus mirrored many aspects of its political and social environment. The renowned architect Walter Gropius founded the school in 1919 and profoundly shaped an almost decade-long period until his departure in 1928. Over the course of his directorship, the institution shifted from an ideology based on medieval stonemasons’ guilds and an expressionist aesthetic to the ideal with which the Bauhaus is most famously associated: art and technology as a new unity. During the first Bauhaus years, life was a heady cocktail of esoteric and occult experimentation that nourished the school’s central project of creating art and objects for a new, post-war world. Perhaps no Bauhaus master was as influential as Johannes Itten during these early years. His teaching was not confined to mere art practice but incorporated spirituality and movement. As adherents of Mazdaznan, Itten and the majority of his students embraced a new, hybrid religion imported from the USA based on Eastern and Western spirituality, meditation, and prayer. Practitioners were instructed to think uniquely positive thoughts, embrace light over darkness, fast regularly, and maintain a specific, vegetarian diet—fortunately catered to by the early Bauhaus cafeteria.
Bauhaus party, “Ilmschlösschen” tavern, Weimar, November 29, 1924
The essential ideological shift away from expressionism at the Bauhaus was made manifest in the school’s first major exhibition, Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, held during the summer of 1923. It was already evident in Gropius’s speeches the previous year and in Itten’s departure from the school in the spring of 1923, when his expressionist aesthetic no longer suited a constructivist Bauhaus. Functionalism and New Objectivity became the guiding principles for an institution that was increasingly oriented towards product development for mass production. Workshops such as carpentry and wall painting, as well as the advertising and weaving classes, created furniture—including the famous tubular steel chairs—wallpaper, textile prints, and graphic design in a distinct style that made Bauhaus the brand of the avant-garde in its time. When the city of Weimar withdrew all financial support from the Bauhaus, Gropius secured its new home in Dessau and enshrined the clean lines of its functionalism in a purpose-built school that opened in 1926. By the time Gropius stepped down as director in 1928, the Bauhaus was at the peak of its popularity in a country that was increasingly politically polarized between right- and left-wing parties. Gropius’s successor, the leftist and even pro-communist architect Hannes Meyer, oriented the entire institution towards education and production for a working class that could not afford expensive accessories. After serious quarrels with the local authorities and within the Bauhaus, Meyer was dismissed in 1930 and soon left for the Soviet Union, accompanied by a so-called “Red Bauhaus Brigade” of former students who sought to support the Stalinist regime by building new Soviet cities.
Students on the balustrade of the canteen terrace, c. 1931
Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the third and final director and another respected modernist architect, politics of any kind were banned and education in construction became even more important. Despite Mies’s attempts to diffuse tensions with the city of Dessau and within the Bauhaus itself, by 1932, the progressive institution was no longer tolerated in a city that had swung hard to the National-Socialist right; it was evicted from its own building. Mies successfully moved the school to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin and attempted to maintain it as a private school, until the Nazi takeover of the country’s government in 1933 left the masters no choice but to dissolve the institute as a final act of freedom, rather than comply with Nazi demands that included dismissing all foreign teachers. In the aftermath, the international Bauhäusler—many of whom were of Jewish descent and left-leaning—often found themselves in difficult positions, either silenced or pushed into exile.
Under Nazism it became starkly evident that Bauhaus women—newer as a group to the art, design, and building scene and fewer in number—had a significantly more difficult time finding work and safe haven. They were more vulnerable than their male peers no matter how successful they had been during the vibrant interwar years. Clearly, their hold on success was more tenuous than that of their now better-known male colleagues. Moreover, rebuilding destroyed careers in the safety of new countries or after the Second World War often proved difficult or impossible for these women.
In retrospect, the story of the Bauhaus can be told as one of integration of genders, classes, and nationalities, specific to the Weimar Republic. From its founding, the Bauhaus was always in part a global vision that drew on traditions from throughout Europe but also ideas from further afield including Expressionist primitivism, minimalist Japonisme, and efficiencies considered “American.” And while a majority of Bauhäusler were from Germany, a few on the faculty and more among the student body came from the more distant parts of Europe and even, in a few cases, as far away as the USA and Japan. Moreover, the Bauhaus movement was forced quite literally to globalize further when its members were cast to the winds in the face of fascism, carrying the Bauhaus spirit all over the world.
Extension of the Prellerhaus 1928. Photo collage from the farewell portfolio for Walter Gropius, 9 Years of the Bauhaus: a Chronicle
As much as the Bauhaus can be understood as a global movement, the school’s history could also be told exclusively through its women, an approach to the history of art more broadly first articulated by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. To date, the definitive text has been Anja Baumhoff’s The Gendered World of the Bauhaus, which focuses in particular on the institution’s internal policies. Baumhoff argues that early Bauhaus prioritizing of craftsmanship over anything construed as handicrafts—and thus gendered female—worked against women. Further, Baumhoff shows that, despite the Bauhaus’s claims of enrolling and educating students regardless of their sex, its policies were dominated by a “hidden agenda” of Gropius and the Master’s Council to reduce the high number of female students. In response, a special “women’s class” was founded in 1920 that soon merged with the weaving workshop and was what Baumhoff calls a “soft” area to keep women away from “hard” work in traditional male media. While several women deliberately—and successfully—entered the male-dominated workshops, others felt quite comfortable in the women’s areas, which allowed them to avoid competition with male students.
On the whole, Baumhoff suggests, the Bauhaus seemed a “pedagogical environment that was not progressive in gender terms,” since it preserved “conventional social forms and values … and hierarchies within the school that revealed a web of paternalism, authority, power, and gender inequalities.” Further scholarship, however, based primarily on biographical work on particular female artists, has nuanced our understanding of women’s roles in the Bauhaus. Already in its own time, Bauhaus women were seen as something special by both experts and the broader public. The essay “Mädchen wollen etwas lernen” (Girls Want to Learn Something), published in the high-circulation magazine Die Woche (The Week) in 1930, for instance, highlights the “Bauhaus-girl type” as an ambitious and creative role model for young women. In recent years a number of exhibitions, books, and articles have raised awareness of the exceptional creativity of women at the Bauhaus without neglecting the structural barriers that they faced. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective follows this path by exploring the personal, sometimes tragic lives of female Bauhäusler and the richness of their artistic expression while attending the school and beyond. Their work often makes it abundantly clear that “Bauhaus” was not an aesthetic or a style, but much more a series of ideas and approaches that played out differently for various artists. This book’s illustrations reveal that “Bauhaus” manifested as a valorizing of craft and design as art forms, a flexibility in thinking, and a facility with diverse media, or an embrace of the modern very broadly.
Illustration for Amor und Psyche (Ceres and Juno) by Margaret Camilla Leiteritz, 1929
Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective presents a wealth of forty-five diverse artists and their work. Best known are those who served on the Bauhaus teaching faculty, Gunta Stölzl (weaving workshop) and Marianne Brandt (metal workshop) as well as Gertrud Grunow and Karla Grosch, both responsible for physical education. The wives and partners of the three Bauhaus directors merit special consideration, above all Ise Gropius, “Frau Bauhaus” herself, but also weaver Lena Meyer-Bergner and architect Lilly Reich. A third influential group are the spouses of Bauhaus faculty, from Lucia Moholy, who played an essential role in documenting the Bauhaus photographically and editing its book series, to wives of young masters who met their husbands as students. Anni Albers, like her husband Joseph, later succeeded in the academic realm, while Gertrud Arndt, Irene Bayer, Ruth Hollós-Consemüller, and Lou Scheper devoted much of their professional lives to supporting their husbands.
The weaving workshop was a popular avenue for female Bauhaus students, and a significant portion of this book’s women specialized in textiles and thus had a major impact on the design of modern fabric and clothing. Benita Otte and Otti Berger were innovators in this field. Others—such as Grete Reichardt, Margarete Leischner, and Kitty Van der Mijll-Dekker—built long-term careers on their craftsmanship. Margarete Dambeck and Lis Beyer represented the best fashion models of their own designs, and Michiko Yamawaki brought more Bauhaus than just her weaving expertise home to Japan. Above all, the Bauhaus sought to train students in constructing the buildings of the future. Among those students were a handful of women whose work we can now appreciate—Katt Both, Lotte Stam-Beese, and Wera Meyer-Waldeck. We know too little, however, about the buildings Zsuzska Bánki planned before she was murdered in Auschwitz, a tragic destiny shared with a few other women profiled in this book. Notably, a number of female Bauhaus students gained reputations as outstanding modernist photographers; Florence Henri discovered photography at the Bauhaus, and the same is true for Ré Soupault, Grit Kallin-Fischer, and Edith Tudor-Hart. Best known in Berlin was Grete Stern, one half of the duo ringl + pit, whereas Hilde Hubbuch and Ricarda Schwerin directed successful portrait studios after the war in exile in the US and Israel respectively. These photographers were part of the Bauhaus generation who, from 1929, were finally able to study photography formally in a Bauhaus workshop; they did so under the technically exacting Walter Peterhans. His students Etel Fodor-Mittag and Ivana Tomljenović took their pictures from life; by contrast, Judit Kárász and Irena Blühová trained their lenses on subjects for social photography.
Wera Meyer-Waldeck working in the carpentry workshop, Dessau Bauhaus. Photograph by Gertrud Arndt, 1930
Only a few Bauhaus women perceived themselves as fine-art painters and sculptors, and, despite their brilliance, the names Ilse Fehling, Margaret Leiteritz, Lore Leudesdorff, Bella Ullmann-Broner, or Stella Steyn are familiar now almost only to Bauhaus experts. Friedl Dicker taught painting and drawing to children in the Jewish ghetto and concentration camp of Theresienstadt before being deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz; meanwhile Lydia Driesch-Foucar attempted to make ends meet in Nazi Germany by selling gingerbread cookies inspired by her Bauhaus experience. Finally, two of the most important ceramicists of the twentieth century came out of the Bauhaus’s facilities in Dornburg, Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain and Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein.
While the forty-five women featured in this volume are representative, this sample cannot claim to be comprehensive. It includes only about ten percent of the total number of Bauhaus women, chosen for the quality of their surviving work, the availability of biographical information, and the diversity of their skills and their lives before and after the Bauhaus. There is more to be said of each of these Bauhäusler, and key resources are indicated in the bibliography. Collectively, they provide a colorful and multifaceted perspective on what becoming a Bauhäusler meant to women in the twentieth century.
Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler
Buffalo, USA, and Erfurt, Germany