B Uh U · W M N Z H L V Ki Vill Tu N H T 19 11 – 29 12 2019
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was the second woman at the Bauhaus to be assigned such a high position in the assistant until 1932, when she opened her own textile workshop in Berlin. 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. Otti Berger 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 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was named the Bauhaus’s third director, upon Another woman to hold a management position in the weaving 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 Weimar, 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. Anni Albers 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 Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, 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 Museum of Modern Art 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 Oskar Schlemmer’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 Villa Tugendhat. 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, textiles, 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.