was the second woman at the to be assigned such a high position in the assistant until 1932, when she opened her own workshop in . Th� Fr�u�nkl���� school’s hierarchy. She left the Bauhaus in late 1929 to work as an interior designer She successfully operated her business until 1936, when she was prevented from in Walter Gropius’s architecture studio. working because of her Jewish heritage. was killed at the Auschwitz B�uh�u� · W�m�n In 1930, after Mayer was forced to leave the school for his political views, the German concentration camp. architect was named the Bauhaus’s third director, upon Another woman to hold a management position in the workshop was Anni Exactly one hundred years ago, the Bauhaus – a new school with a focus on a recommendation from Gropius. In 1932, the school was forced to leave Dessau for Albers, who was a leading proponent of weaving as an artistic form of expression architecture and industrial design formed by the merger of the local art academy political reasons, and so Mies moved the Bauhaus (now as a private institution) to equal to painting and other traditionally recognized art forms. Annelise (Anni) Elsa and school of applied art – opened its doors in , Germany. The school’s first a provisional home in a former factory in Berlin-Steglitz. The following year, however, Frieda Fleischmann began studying at the Bauhaus in 1922, where she met her �z��h��l�v�ki� director, the architect Walter Gropius, aimed for “the union of all the arts under the the National Socialists closed down the school for good. husband Josef Albers, who was head of the school’s glass workshop. leadership of architecture and the renewed close relationship between arts and All in all, 462 women studied at all the Bauhaus locations – i.e., in Weimar, Dessau, had originally wanted to study glass, but she was prevented from doing so, and so crafts. Art and technology shall form a new unity. The ultimate goal of all artistic and Berlin. Many of them applied to the school thinking that they would be able to after the school’s move to Dessau she entered Gunta Stölzl’s weaving workshop. activity is the building.” He succeeded in hiring such representatives of avant- study architecture or design (glass, furniture, or metal design), but after completing In 1933, she and her husband emigrated to the USA, where she made her name as garde art as , , Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and the preparatory courses led by Johannes Itten, most of them, in Weimar at least, a textile designer. She had a solo exhibition at the in New László Moholy-Nagy. As Gropius proclaimed in the school’s official program and in were forced to transfer to the weaving workshop, which was known as the York in 1949, and in January 2019 a four-month-long retrospective of her work a speech given at its opening, the Bauhaus would follow modern teaching methods . Although this workshop was the school’s most productive and most ended at the Tate Modern in London. The main theme of the exhibition Bauhaus ∙ Women while offering equal access to education: “We accept for apprenticeship any person Frauenklasse successful, the low regard in which it was held by some of the male Bauhaus In 1932, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made Lilly Reich the head of the weaving of untarnished reputation, regardless of gender or age, providing they be considered Czechoslovakia is the often tragic fate of female members is perfectly encapsulated by ’s statement that “Where workshop and the building and interior design department at the Bauhaus, where sufficiently capable and educated by the master’s council. […] We shall make no there’s wool, you’ll women find, even if they weave to just pass the time.” she remained until the school’s closure by the Nazis in 1933. Reich had initially Bauhaus students associated with Czechoslovakia distinction between the fair sex and the strong sex; there shall be absolute equality From its founding until the school’s move to Dessau, the workshop’s crafts master apprenticed as a seamstress and in 1908 began working at Josef Hoffmann’s Wiener and their specific experiences as students of one of the but also complete parity of obligations – no concessions to the ladies; we are crafts- was Helene Börner. From 1920, the master of form was Georg Muche. With Werkstätte. Three years later, she returned to Germany, where she focused on people all when it comes to our work.” most progressive art schools of the early 20th century. Muche’s departure in 1927, Gunta Stölzl was named the workshop’s head, furniture and fashion design. She joined the German Werkbund in 1912 and became Women had received the right to vote – and to freely choose their subject of study – making her the first female member of the school’s council of masters. In her the first female member of its board in 1920. In 1924–1926, she worked for the Trade only a year earlier, with the founding of the Weimar Republic. And yet, the first teaching methods, Stölzl focused primarily on working with new textile materials Fair Office in Frankfurt am Main, where she made the life-changing acquaintance women to apply for the Bauhaus in 1919 had already completed their education and on the use of modern technologies that made it possible to reorient what of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Over the next several decades, they collaborated in the fields of teaching and applied art. Applicants for the 1919 summer semester had previously been a craft towards abstract industrial design. on architectural designs for numerous exhibitions and home interiors, including numbered 84 women versus 79 men. Startled at these figures and worried that such Gunta Stölzl was accepted to the Bauhaus in 1919 and spent the 1919–1920 . In 1937, four years after the Bauhaus was forced to close by the a high number of female students might lower the school’s prestige, Gropius advised academic year attending Johannes Itten’s preparatory course and his workshop Nazis, Mies emigrated to the USA, where Reich joined him two years later. Following the master’s council to accept women only to the weaving and ceramics programs. for murals and glass painting. The next year, she studied in the , her return to Germany, she was drafted into Organization Todt. After the war, she In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to the industrial town of Dessau, where Frauenklasse i.e., Itten and Börner’s weaving workshop. Stölzl and Marcel Breuer, who joined taught interior design, and until her death in 1947 she operated a studio in Berlin women were given greater opportunities. After Gropius’s departure in 1928, the the school in 1920, collaborated on the design of the “African Chair” – Breuer specializing in architecture, design, , and fashion. school’s leadership passed to the more leftist and egalitarian Swiss architect did the frame and Stölzl the textile weave. In 1921–1922, she designed fabrics In the late 1980s, German art historian Magdalena Droste, whose specialization 19 11 – 29 12 Hannes Meyer, thanks to whom female students could study in other fields as well. for Walter Gropius’s Sommerfeld House. From 1921 to 1925, she attended Georg is the history of the Bauhaus, published , a book dedicated For instance, after László Moholy-Nagy left in 1928, the metal workshop was briefly Frauen im Design Muche’s weaving workshop while also studying new methods for dyeing and to the important position that female designers hold in the history of applied art. run by his favorite student Marianne Brandt. producing fabrics at the School of Textile Design in Krefeld. In 1924, she went to This was followed by numerous other projects that have helped to rehabilitate Marianne Liebe, who later married the Norwegian painter Erik Brandt and lived work at Itten’s newly established Ontos Weaving Workshop (Ontos Werkstätte) in the importance of the work done by the Bauhaus’s female graduates. In 1996, the www.tugendhat.eu with him in Oslo and Paris, had been inspired by the school’s first exhibition to 2019 Herrliberg on Lake Zurich. The following year, she returned to the Bauhaus as the MoMA organized an exhibition on the furniture and textile designer Lilly Reich, who apply as a student in 1923. She attended a preparatory course taught by Josef master of the weaving workshop, which she took over as its first female head after significantly influenced the look of several iconic works by architect Ludwig Mies Albers and Moholy-Nagy, and also studied the theory of forms and colors under Georg Muche’s departure in 1927. In 1928, she went on a study trip to Moscow. van der Rohe, with whom she shared a close personal and professional relationship. Klee and Kandinsky. But most important was her encounter with Moholy-Nagy, in In early August 1929, she married the Bauhaus student and later architect Arieh This exhibition, too, hopes to remember and highlight the role of Lilly Reich, who, whose metal workshop she created her asymmetrical designs for copper teapots. Sharon, and on 8 October of that year she gave birth to their daughter Yeal. according to Magdalena Droste, formed a “creative pair” with Mies van der Rohe. There followed a study trip to Paris, where she produced numerous collages In 1931, Stölzl left the Bauhaus because of political reasons and internal conflicts and photo-collages. In 1926, she designed the first lamp fittings for the Bauhaus and emigrated to , where she and the Bauhaus graduates Gertrud building in Dessau. Brandt and designer Hin Bredendieck together created the Preiswerk and Heinrich Otto Hürlimann founded the S-P-H Stoffe weaving work- designs for several companies’ mass-produced lamps and also managed the shop in Zurich later that year. school’s collaboration with commercial entities. During her time at the Bauhaus, For her successor as the head of the weaving workshop, Stölzl recommended her Brandt produced more than 28 lamp designs, and in 1927 she began teaching assistant of many years, Otti Berger. Although Berger prepared the workshop’s Vill� Tu��n�h�t specialized courses on experimentation with lighting fixtures in the metal workshop. study program in terms all educational, production-related, and practical aspects, After Moholy-Nagy’s departure, she was named the temporary head of the metal she was never officially hired. Instead, the Bauhaus’s new director Ludwig Mies workshop until Alfred Arndt took over in 1929. After Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt van der Rohe entrusted the workshop to Lilly Reich, and Berger worked as her

from each other’s ideas. The mere fact that the teacher cannot overburden them day they wanted to create dolls in order to do something together with them, for with his attention makes them more reliant on themselves and on each other. In this example play theater. The girls were quite inhibited, nothing pleased them, they all Fr���rik� Br�n��i�: way something emerges that plays an important role in later life – namely, group wanted to make princesses, and were dissatisfied with everything they did. In the work. Not competing individuals, but shared productivity. Through concentrated end they showed me their “babies,” plump, soft, long eyelashes, make-up. Their rag �hil�r�n’� �r�win� cooperation in a joint effort, using the most personal means, the group and the dolls could not compete of course. I suggested they take one of the products they individual achieve the best results. Under these conditions, they are also able to considered ugly and turn it into a member of the Putzkolonne (cleaning brigade), and cope with difficulties resulting from a shortage of materials, to be humble, to help soon thereafter they were cheerfully creating a water sprite, some cooks, a wizard The goal of art education should not be to turn all children into painters, but to one another, and to become a part of the whole. and some animals, even a member of the Klodienst (toilet squad). develop or, rather, to maintain creativity and independence as a source of energy The magnificent Heim VI wants to paint. There are too few brushes, paint pots Uncontrasted, uncritically accepted, content-free “beauty,” the Makartstil of time in everyone, to awaken young people’s imagination and to promote their own or walls at its disposal. The boys who have come together to form this group immemorial, haunts and inhibits us still, here and now. viewpoint and perceptiveness. (irrespective of the program, for the purpose of painting) must be aware that they Everything (first and foremost, the distance from one’s parents) that opposes ready- Art education as previously practiced bears the blame for the decline of the will all get a chance to paint without regard to the level of their talent, and have made products, even at the cost of temporarily doing without unknown forms, imagination and the gradual loss of creative ability in young people. themselves proposed the group’s division, even though this means that for three without unexperienced beauty, helps the teacher. Folk art, primitive art, modern The best allies against the ready-made product, against approved aesthetic ideas quarters of them their turn will come later. They recognize the superiority of those painters and sculptors, and – through them and understood through one’s own and the paralyzed world of adults, are the true artists, and when they are lifted out who are passionately interested in painting and are prepared to stand behind them power of judgment – Old Masters. of routine, they themselves become children. and to be satisfied with assisting, preparing the walls, and mixing the paints. Acting Wherever a force reflects upon itself and attempts to assert itself without fear With children under ten – in terms of maturity, not years – the teacher should ensure independently or on the advice of others, they find a place for their various talents: of ridicule, there springs forth a new source of creative energy, and this is the aim above all that they are not disturbed while playing and experimenting. There is One keeps a list and assigns the groups, manages the material, and wants to be of our efforts towards a new art education. no point in trying to educate them, for at that narcissistic age they will react to the responsible for this; another wants to keep the painting journal; others just want to mixing of the senses by turning away from activity. At that age, drawing and painting help with painting or with creating sketches on paper. One is even willing to scare up (Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Kinderzeichnen, typescript. Concentration camp for Jews, are the chief means of expression. and procure material. None of these activities must be seen as less worthy; the boys known as the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto 1942–1944, deposited in the Jewish Children over ten start to be dissatisfied with their means of expression. must know that everyone will get his turn. Museum in Prague.) The wider world around them begins to acquire meaning – no longer as it exists The boys in particular had to wait for a brush of any sort to become available, and to in their imagination, but as it is in reality. Only now does formative education come lend amongst each other. Before, paper and cardboard would disappear in the Heim; to the fore, but it must not obscure what is just breaking free or is already liberated. now all the boys can be trusted absolutely (it should also be possible to place the The technical side of drawing and painting must be offered precisely according to more talented ones in charge of guiding an artistically weaker group). The sheets the child’s needs. The elements with which it operates must naturally be the same were intended as drafts, subjected to common criticism, and the best of them as those of “great art,” and by making the child particularly aware of them, we leave chosen objectively. Children who produce their own work immediately abandon open the child’s path towards finding them. Size and the relationships between sizes the mocking, spiteful sort of criticism. One can gain much of value from the lives (proportions), rhythm, light, dark, plasticity, spaciousness, color, the expressive and different characteristics of those who are not outwardly successful. Mistakes values of over- or understatement and composition. – or rather, the unsatisfactory aspects of a particular task – provide an impulse for Children’s imagination is not to be directed. Not only would we surrender the new ideas. When we recognize similarities not with our original objective but with possibility of penetrating the world of their ideas; we would also lose an overview random chance, we add to everyone’s wealth of forms. Mistakes make the child Exhibition concept: Markéta Svobodová Private Archive of Joachim Rindler, of the current level of their level of receptiveness, their abilities, and their mental critical but not intolerant towards its own attempts and those of others. Curators: Lucie Valdhansová, Private Archive of Marie Jirásková, state. If teachers have sufficient experience in transforming the material back into Because I am often asked about the meaning of rhythmic exercises, I would like to Barbora Benčíková Private Archive of Pavel Rossmann, the etiological, then the child’s drawings will provide important insight into and make a special point of them here. They have shown themselves to be a suitable Texts: Markéta Svobodová, TextielMuseum Tilburg, information about its spiritual life. If not, then they are better off relying instead on means for transforming a horde into a working group willing to surrender itself to Lucie Valdhansová Jewish Museum in Prague their daily observations. Although the child enthusiastically and joyfully accepts a common cause instead of disrupting each other or even destroying each other’s Architectural design: Studio PIXLE Proofreading: Kateřina Havelková any sort of expansion of its intellectual world, it must never be forced. Knowledge creations. (One side effect is that they give exhilaration and flexibility to the hands Graphic design for exhibition and print Štěpančíková prematurely presented to a child – either because it exceeds the child’s capacity for and entire person of the painter.) In addition, they liberate the children from mental materials: Studio PIXLE Translations: Stephan von Pohl, comprehension or it is offered at a time when the child is focused on other interests and visual stereotypes (we will later see how necessary this is) and present them Photographs: Bauhaus-Archive Berlin, Megan Bedell – is felt as an intrusion into its world and is met with aversion and failure. with a task they can fulfil with zest and imagination and at the same time with the Moravian Gallery in , The Moravian Acknowledgements: Zuzana Blühová, The difficulty that meager technical means pose to the teacher can be transformed greatest of precision. Completing a task produces a sense of satisfaction, and the Museum, Brno City Museum, Jindřich Chatrný, Marie Jirásková, into a teaching opportunity if the teacher is already in direct contact with the concentration required enables the child to face even more complex impressions. Museum of Czech Literature, Helly Oestereicher, Joachim Rindler, children. The worst part is the beginning, but a shortage of means of expression Must it be an aural impression? No, it merely has to be simple, unambiguous, and Slovak National Gallery, Pavel Rossmann, Marta Sylvestrová is regrettably going to persist. variable. What is more, with a task deviating from their fixed habits the children all It is better to teach a larger number of children than a small group or an individual. start from the same point; harmony not only cheers them, it stimulates them as well. In larger numbers, children stimulate one another; they create a more stable I had an intense experience of what an obstacle habit can be in a class of ten- to The exhibition was prepared atmosphere and almost always prefer the good to the worse. Children profit mutually twelve-year-old girls. Several of them were playing with large celluloid dolls. One by the Tugendhat Study and Documentation Centre and was realized with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the . 27 May 1902, Karlovy Vary 2 Mar. 1904, Povážská Bystrica 30 June 1898, 9 Dec. 1909, Nitkovice near Kroměříž Li���th – 6 Nov. 1989, Ir�n� – 30 Nov. 1991, Bratislava Fri��l – 9 Oct. 1944, Auschwitz M�ri� – 29 May 1983, Pra�ue Bi�rm�n- Blüh�v� �i�k�r- D�l�ž�l�v� ���tr�i�h�r Br�n��i� R���m�nn�v�

Lisbeth Oestreicher, born into a German Jewish family in Karlovy Vary, is the Irena Blühová joined Walter Peterhans’s photography workshop at the Bauhaus Jewish artist Friedl Dicker began studying at Johannes Itten’s private school in Marie Doleželová came to the Bauhaus in 1930 directly from Brno’s School of Arts Bauhaus’s only Czechoslovak graduate in the field of textiles and weaving. She in 1931 as a mature, leftist-oriented individual with a background in social reportage Vienna in 1916, and later joined him in leaving for the newly opened Bauhaus and Crafts, where she had studied clothing design. During her studies in Brno, she studied at schools of applied art in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin before joining the photography in her native Váh River region. Blühová began photographing in in Weimar, where she continued her studies until 1923. After returning to Vienna, was actively involved in theater life as part of the Academic Stage theater ensemble. Bauhaus in 1926, where the textile workshop was headed by Gunta Stölzl. She 1924 on her hikes through nature, and gradually moved from nature motifs to she opened her own studio, and in 1926 founded the Singer-Dicker interior and In Dessau, she switched from textiles to photography, which she studied under earned her degree in October 1930, when the school’s directorship had passed to documentary images of ’s most underdeveloped regions. While at the home design company with her partner, the Bauhaus graduate Franz Singer. Walter Peterhans. Both she and her future husband, the architect and typographer Mies van der Rohe. Bauhaus, she also studied typography and advertising with Joost Schmidt – skills This successful studio quickly began working for ethnic German citizens of Zdeněk Rossmann, were forced to leave the Bauhaus in 1931 because of their political Oestreicher came to the Bauhaus unburdened by the experiences from Weimar and she later applied to her poster designs and photomontage magazine covers. Above Czechoslovakia – for instance, the company’s archives stored at the Bauhaus leanings – they were part of a group of leftist students who protested the departure was influenced primarily by the views of Hannes Meyer. By 1928, she was actively all, Blühová’s Bauhaus experience led her to refine her “sociological research” and Archive in Berlin contain designs for a living room in the villa of a Dr. Spitzer in Žilina, of director Hannes Meyer. They left for Paris, but the Great Depression was at its collaborating with industry, for instance designing simple woven fabrics with a rib to incorporate into her work the compositional and functional principles typical for Slovakia (ca. 1925), photographic documentation of the renovation and refurnishing peak and they had no chance of finding work. In September 1931, the director of weave for the Polytextil company in Berlin and for Mechanische Weberei Pausa in modern photography. Although she is usually categorized as a socially engaged of Franz Neumann’s villa in Liberec, and the furnishings for Neumann’s home in Bratislava’s School of Artistic Craftsmanship, Josef Vydra, offered Zdeněk Rossmann Mössingen. In 1930, Oestreicher and her friend Ljuba Monastirsky spent two months artist, we should not forget her documentary images or formal compositions from Prague (undated). a position as head of the printmaking department. During their time in Bratislava, as interns at Mechanische Weberei Pausa. During her studies, she was especially the Bauhaus, which testify to her uncommon artistic vision and enthusiasm for After the rise of the Nazis, Dicker left Vienna for Prague in 1934, where she shared Marie Rossmannová could continue to study photography, now under Jaromír Funke. interested in fabric dyeing, and in 1929 she began to work as a Mitarbeiterin in the experimentation. a studio with her classmate, the Viennese architect Grete Bauer-Fröhlich, and was Since the Rossmann family’s archive was destroyed by the Gestapo, much of Marie school’s dye workshop. A year later, the Bauhaus sent her to I. G. Farben in Hoechst After leaving the Bauhaus and working for the Liberec-based publishing house of actively engaged in helping German and Austrian émigrés. In 1935, her application Rossmannová’s photographic work is known only from magazine reproductions near Frankfurt am Main, where she took a course to expand her knowledge in Runge & Co. and the Left Front in Prague, Blühová was entrusted with management for a residency permit was rejected because of her communist activities, but she and a few surviving photographs held by the Moravian Gallery in Brno. However, the this area. In the summer months, she worked in her studio at her family’s home in of the Blüh publishing house and bookshop in Bratislava (1933–1941). At the same managed to acquire Czechoslovak citizenship in April 1936 thanks to her marriage family managed to save numerous intimate photographs shot by Marie and Zdeněk, Karlovy Vary, where she could sell her products to guests of the spa town. She also time, she attended evening courses with the Czech ethnographer and photographer to her cousin Pavel Brandeis. In 1938–1942, she and her husband found refuge who both intensively documented their private life, especially the period following the created clothing designs for various sewing pattern magazines published by the Karel Plicka at the recently opened film department of Bratislava’s School of Artistic in Hronov, where she worked for the B. Spieger & Son textile factory along with birth of their son Pavel. The child became the focal point of their world and the main Ullstein or Bayer publishing houses. Craftsmanship. Unlike Plicka’s heroic and idealized Slovakia, Blühová took a critical her husband. In 1938, Dicker-Brandeis helped organize the exhibition Náchod 38 subject of the photographs they took while on holiday at the family’s country home After graduating in 1930, Oestreicher left for the Netherlands, where she earned and sometimes uncompromisingly documentary approach to reality. Her anonymously marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic, where in Polanka nad Odrou. a living as a designer for various textile factories and also produced her own models published images served primarily as a means of indictment and a modern form of her textile design won a gold medal. During this time, she also engaged in painting. Although Marie Rossmannová stood in the shadow of her famous husband, her on a . In 1934, the poor economic situation forced her to leave this work and political propaganda. In terms of iconography, she focused on the somber themes In 1942, husband and wife were deported to Theresienstadt, where Friedl taught known photographs – in particular her material compositions – are confirmation move to Amsterdam, where she opened her own studio. She did very little weaving of homelessness, hard physical labor, unemployment, and workers’ strikes. art and provided art therapy in the boys’ and girls’ homes. Before her departure for of her great talent. One example is Still-Lifes on the Banks of the Seine, a series of at the time, and for economic reasons designed and created primarily knit and After 1932, Blühová worked for the leftist Slovak magazines Dav, Nová Bratislava, Auschwitz, she had a suitcase full of children’s artworks hidden in an attic. After the images of old items that she found and photographed during her time in Paris. Some crocheted clothing for individuals and for companies that produced woolen clothing. and Ročenka slovenskej chudoby, the Czech communist periodical Tvorba, war, these works made it to the Jewish Museum in Prague. photographs from this series feel almost poetically surreal. Her later social reportage Oestreicher’s sister Marie Karoline Oestreicher managed to move from Vienna to the ’s Az út, and Germany’s Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, where she published In her approach to teaching, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis worked with the concepts photographs from 1932–1933, which she shot as a member of the Left Front for Netherlands before the war, and the two of them opened a joint studio called “Model her sociological photo-studies, photomontages, collages, and writings anonymously. developed by Franz Cižek, Johannes Itten, and other artists. In her view, “the goal Czech (Index) and Slovak (Dav and Nová Bratislava) magazines, were used primarily en foto .” Marie (pseudonym Maria Austria), who after the war went on to Since the magazines were communist (i.e., international) in nature, the images, of art education should not be to turn all children into painters, but to develop or, for political propaganda, although they did not possess the call to action found in become a leading theater photographer, worked as her sister’s personal fashion themes, and photographs were often interrelated or repeated themselves. rather, to maintain creativity and independence as a source of energy in everyone, the work of Irena Blühová. Rossmannová’s most technically perfect images are those photographer. After returning home from the Westerbork concentration camp, She became an active member of the Sociofoto association, which participated to awaken young people’s imagination and to promote their own viewpoint and she made under Funke’s guidance at the School of Artistic Craftsmanship, when Lisbeth gave up her professional career in order to look after her dead brother’s in several sociologically conceived exhibitions in Bratislava, Brno, and Prague. perceptiveness.” she produced intimate arranged still-lifes, shot from above, of various objects, toys, children and only occasionally produced knit models for Merz & Co. in Amsterdam. But Blühová’s work included another position as well, represented by her reportage and jewelry in which she made maximum use of the tools of modern photography – Here, too, she remained true to the ideas of the Bauhaus: “For me, the starting photographs of everyday life. These sensitive images were recognized by numerous diagonal composition, high angles, humor, and poetic playfulness. These were also points are always the material, structure, and color. The only thing that changes other artists, including John Heartfield, who used her photographs from the Kysuca almost certainly the qualities for which her husband used her images in his collages is the shape. Shape relates to time. Otherwise, I like symmetry in my work. I enjoy cycle in his cover design for the German edition of Peter Jilemnický’s book Fallow and graphic designs. irregularity within a geometric framework.” Land (Brachland, London 1935). During the war, when Blühová was active in illegal Rossmannová spent the war imprisoned in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration activities, her photographs began to take on a more intimate and lyrical quality camp. Her dangerous journey home to Moravia through war-ravaged Europe is (Clouds, Early Spring in the Lesser Fatra, 1941). She continued in her photographic described in her diaries. After the war, she stopped working with photography for endeavors after the war as well. health reasons.

18 Jan. 1894, Pra�ue 8 Mar. 1913, Budapest 28 Feb. 1903, Rokitki, Poland Women Lu�i� – 17 May 1989, Zurich E�ith – 6 Sept. 1986, Pra�ue L�tt� – 18 Nov. 1988, Krimpen aan den IJssel, J���n�k� at the typewriter M�h�ly Rin�l�r �t�m- Netherlands V��l�vk�v� B���� V�n�r��k�v�

The photographer Lucia Moholy, née Schulz, hailed from a Prague German Jewish Edith Rindler came from an important Prague German Jewish family. Her father Lotte Beese began studying at the Bauhaus in 1926, initially in the “women’s field” The evolving contacts between the Czechoslovak and European avant-garde – family and came to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923 along with her husband László Alois Rindler, a grain wholesaler, supported the studies of his third daughter, who of textiles and weaving but after the building department was established in 1927 Bauhaus included – were fostered in part by women, who promoted the movement’s Moholy-Nagy. After graduating from the German lyceum in Prague in 1910, Moholy’s showed a talent for math. After completing secondary school, she spent one year under the guidance of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, she joined it as its first female ideas in trade journals and in popular magazines and periodicals. Especially worth knowledge of English and German helped her find work as a teacher and translator. apprenticing as a joiner under Josef Lippertz in Prague. In 1931, she applied to student. After beginning an affair with the married Meyer, however, she was forced mentioning is the translation work of two women who otherwise stood in the According to her official biography, she studied art history and philosophy at study interior design at the State School for Fine and Applied Art in Berlin, but after to leave the school in 1928 despite its otherwise liberal environment. shadows of “great men” – Milena Jesenská (1896–1944) and Jaroslava Václavková Prague’s German University, but this fact could not be confirmed in the university’s being rejected for her insufficient professional training, she left for the Bauhaus Meyer employed her in his office in Berlin, but she wanted to go elsewhere, and (1905–1978). Both women actively translated from German, Václavková – who archives. It is nevertheless possible that she attended lectures there. Dessau. through his contacts with the Czechoslovak avant-garde, which he had nurtured studied Slavic and Latin languages – also from French. Jaroslava Václavková worked In 1915–1918, Moholy was editor-in-chief of the Wiesbadener Zeitung and also At the Bauhaus, Rindler studied in the building department in 1931–1932. Another since 1925, he managed to find her a job in Bohuslav Fuchs’s building office in mainly for her husband, the Marxist theorist Bedřich Václavek, and his avant-garde worked as a copyeditor for various publishing houses in Leipzig and Berlin, which member of a Prague Jewish family, Mathilde Wiener, had begun studying at the Brno. The first project that Beese worked on in Brno was the Vesna Trade School for magazine and publishing house Index. The journalist Milena Jesenská – the wife of is where she met László Moholy-Nagy, whom she married in 1921. In the 1920s, she school just before her, and other students in the department at the same time as Women’s Professions, a boarding school designed by Fuchs and Josef Polášek in architect Jaromír Krejcar, who represented the Bauhaus company in Czechoslovakia collaborated with her husband in the field of experimental photography and also Edith included Inge Stipanitz, a German woman from Moravská Ostrava. Several 1929. She also worked on Fuchs’s Morava Sanatorium in Tatranská Lomnica (1930– – wrote mostly for popular magazines such as Pestrý týden. In her articles, which wrote numerous art historical texts. In 1923, she followed Moholy-Nagy to Weimar, portrait photographs of Edith made by Irena Blühová have been preserved from her 1931) and the Moravian Bank in Brno (1929–1930). Beese was also an excellent she wrote on the basis of material she received from her husband and from the where she studied under photographer Otto Eckner before transferring to the time as a student at the Bauhaus. Unfortunately, there are no known architectural photographer, as evidenced among other things by her portrait of her Brno friend, textile artist Jaroslava Vondráčková, Jesenská advised her readers on how to furnish Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig the following year. realizations by any of the three women. At the peak of the Great Depression, women the actress Nina Balcarová, taken at the Moravian Museum in Brno. a modern home: “Our modern homes have completely changed in recent years. In Dessau after the Bauhaus’s move there, Moholy created her well-known series had little chance for success in the building industry, and many of them never went In November 1930, Beese went to see Meyer in Moscow, but following a conflict […] The entire system of life as we lead it demands a completely different interior. of photographs of architecture, workshop products, and people, and contributed on to practice their studied profession. Edith’s great desire to become an architect with him she returned, pregnant, to Brno several months later and subsequently We love air, space, and light, and are not afraid of half-empty rooms. […] The most to promoting the school. Her cinema-influenced portrait and reportage photographs is evidenced by the fact that, after leaving Dessau, she studied construction gave birth to her son Peter. As a single mother and member of the Left Front, she important decorative elements in a modern home are textile products.” are not as sharp and static as the work of the German photographers of the New at the School of Industry in Prague, where the construction department was focused primarily on political activities – she had previously left Fuchs’s architecture As director of an Artěl sales outlet (1927–1931), Jaroslava Vondráčková (1894–1986), Objectivity. In 1928, she departed for Berlin with Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius, headed by architect Oldřich Starý, a colleague of Karel Teige’s from the editorial firm after taking him to court for failing to pay three months’ maternity leave. who nurtured close ties to Devětsil, imported hand-woven fabrics produced among where she helped edit her husband’s book Von Material zur Architektur. After board of Stavba magazine and president of the Club of Architects. After taking In 1932, she was forced to leave Czechoslovakia because of her leftist activities, but other places at the Bauhaus workshops. She was a member of the Left Front separating from her husband, she replaced Otto Umbehr (Umbo) as a teacher in a supplementary exam in several subjects, Rindler was immediately accepted into managed (possibly thanks to contacts facilitated by Jaromír Krejcar and Karel Teige) and promoted functionalist ideas in the textile industry through articles written Johannes Itten’s art school and participated in her first international exhibitions,Film the third year of studies, where she was one of only a few female students. She to find work at the Society of Modern Architects of Ukraine (ОСАУ), a collective in for industry and lay audiences and published in Panorama, Žijeme, Národní listy, und Foto in Stuttgart (1929) and Das Lichtbild (1930) in Munich. graduated in 1936. the town of Kharkiv. While in Ukraine, she met the Dutch architect Mart Stam, whom Lidové noviny, Pestrý týden, and Elegantní Praha. She also worked with numerous In the early 1930s, Lucia Moholy began a relationship with the German communist Edith Rindler had a very difficult life, although she managed to avoid the concentration she married in 1934. avant-garde architects, for instance with Jaromír Krejcar on the furnishings for Grete leader, editor, and author Theodor Neubauer and also worked on a series of portraits camps by emigrating with her family to South America in November 1939. The family Stam-Beese and Stam appeared one more time in Czechoslovakia after leaving Reiner’s villa in Prague-Strašnice (1927) and for his own home. of Clara Zetkin. After Neubauer’s arrest by the Nazis in August 1933, she was forced later settled in Chile, where she primarily worked as a translator. After the war, the Soviet Union in 1935. Based on her correspondence with Karel Teige, they spent Vondráčková visited the Bauhaus with Karel Teige. The personal and professional to emigrate via Prague, Vienna, and Paris to London, where she lectured at the she returned to Czechoslovakia to enthusiastically rebuild postwar Europe, but as the summer in the Bohemian Forest and then were in Brno and Prague, where they friendships she nurtured with the school’s teachers and students are documented London School of Printing and Graphic Arts and the Central School of Arts and a single mother she found it hard to make a living. She and her son initially lived apparently gave a talk at the Café Metro on their projects in the USSR. That same by her relatively extensive correspondence with, among others, Hannes Meyer Crafts. In 1939, she published the book A Hundred Years of Photography. with Irena Blühová in Bratislava, but after several mutual disagreements she went year, husband and wife founded their own architecture firm in Amsterdam. Beese and his wife, the textile designer Lena Meyer-Bergner. She was also friends and The close ties between this Central European woman and Vienna’s cultural circles to Karlovy Vary, where she found work at the state-run Pozemní Stavby construction was at a disadvantage because she had never completed her studies, and so at age collaborated with the Croatian textile artist Otti Berger, with whom she shared is evidenced by her correspondence with Otto Neurath. In 1940, she began company. According to archival information, she changed jobs frequently. 37 she applied to an architecture program in Amsterdam, which she completed in an interest in new materials. After the dissolution of the Bauhaus Dessau, Berger documenting the holdings of the Cambridge University Library on microfilm. In 1958–1959, her foreign contacts brought her to the attention of military intelligence, 1945. However, the combined pressure of her studies, work, looking after her family, purchased the workshop’s and materials and opened her own studio in Berlin. Two years later, she founded the Association of Special Libraries and Information which suspected her of spying against communist Czechoslovakia. She was placed and the war in Europe had a negative impact on her marriage, and she and Stam She experimented with various materials and collaborated with numerous architects Bureaux (ASLIB), which produced microfilm copies of scientific documents from all under constant pressure and harassment by state security, and eventually ended up divorced in 1943. Lotte Stam-Beese’s career began to take off after 1946, when (e.g., Hans Scharoun) and textile companies in Germany and the Netherlands. over Europe for Bletchley Park, where the famous Enigma code was deciphered. in prison (Vykmanov, Pardubice) and in a psychiatric institution. These events had she was one of only a few female architects to actively participate in the postwar Vondráčková’s surviving papers include Berger’s letters from Great Britain, She spent the final days of her life in Switzerland. a negative impact on her mental and physical health, and in 1977 a decision by the reconstruction of Rotterdam and in the construction of Functionalist housing estates where she had moved in 1937, and from Yugoslavia in the years before Berger’s District Court for Prague 6 partially stripped her of legal capacity and placed her in nearby. deportation to a concentration camp. an institution in Svojšice.