Grete Stern, Self-portrait, 1943, Courtesy of the Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Recently, an image of a silver and ebony teapot by Marianne Brandt has been doing the rounds on Instagram and Twitter. It was designed in 1924 – it’s delicious. The shape suggests two halves of a circle slid apart. It’s angular but oddly voluptuous. Serious, thanks to the hard metal, but completely playful. “Divine,” says one person on Twitter. “It maintains balance while being unbalanced,” says another. “I like! And I’m not usually a big fan of Bauhaus design,” says someone else.
The last comment is telling – those familiar with the greats of Bauhaus likely recognise the work of men like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s those figures that people associate with the term ‘Bauhaus’, a reference so pervasive across design and fashion today that one can hardly get through a season without being presented with a ‘Bauhaus’ themed collection – Mary Katrantzou, Riccardo Tisci and Phoebe Philo have paid tribute to the German school. By contrast, the women’s output, and the women themselves, have been overlooked. If they are referred to, it is often simply as one half of a power couple, with little focus on their own practice. That’s why Brandt’s underrated teapot looked so fresh to a social media generation.
This year marks a century since the school opened in Weimar Germany under the direction of founder Walter Gropius. He publicised it as a place where all were equal. According to him, it welcomed “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex”. That marked an exciting prospect for women, who before that lacked access to a formal arts education. “When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men – so why have we never heard of them?” asked The Guardian newspaper in 2009. Frequently, theirs is referred to as a “lost history”. In fact, almost every article about the women of Bauhaus focuses on talking not about them but about why they haven’t received enough attention.
Katy Hessel, founder of the popular Instagram account @thegreatwomenartists, is unsurprised by the unbalanced focus on the male figures. She’s thrilled to see the ongoing exhibition at Tate Modern dedicated to the work of Anni Albers, and is described by Tate as “a long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design”. Albers arrived at the Bauhaus school with the aim of continuing painting studies, but ended up working in the weaving school, eventually heading it up in 1931 before emigrating to the US two years later. “Like so many forgotten women, she was overlooked because of her gender,” says Hessel. “Walter Gropius, founder of Bauhaus, restricted the number of women permitted to the Bauhaus, and directed them to weaving and ceramics. However, the women were pioneers in their industry and developed very sophisticated and modern theories of weaving.”
Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937
Indeed, though Gropius promised equality, he held up the notion that men and women were innately different. He paradoxically declared the Bauhaus school a space where there would be “no differences between the fairer sex and the stronger sex”. In the end, those notions of women as gentile and fair and men as robust informed who did what – hence women ended up weaving and men busied themselves with painting or wood and metal work. And although the school was founded on the principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk – where art, architecture and design came together as one treated in a non-hierarchical way – the school clearly prioritised certain fields, notably architecture. Similarly, critics and writers of the era focused strongly on architecture and industrial design at the expense of other disciplines, so women artists were left out of the history books. This has continued right up until today, observes Hessel – “This is the first exhibition at Tate by a ‘weaver’ – this medium hasn’t been put into spotlight enough in fine art”.
In an essay commissioned by Tate to accompany the exhibition, Sheila Hicks recalls meeting Albers while a student at Yale School of Art from 1954 to 1957. Albers’ husband, Josef Albers, a Bauhaus great, was Hick’s tutor. “I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know who Anni Albers was when I began studying,” she says. Josef Albers saw her experimenting with textiles and suggested she come over and meet his wife. “It seemed to me that she was giving meaning and expression to this soft, pliable material. I don’t think I understood her work back then, but now I have a better notion of what it was she was doing – her intelligent, technical virtuosity.”
As Hicks implies, the women of the Bauhaus could not be more relevant now. Today, we are rightly obsessed with ‘firsts’ – the early boundary-breaking individuals who go where women haven’t gone before, be that in politics, sport or the arts. The women of Bauhaus are central to this history. Not only did they pave the way for other women through their appointments and teaching, they also moved our concepts of art and design forward. Hessell points to way in which they sparked conversations about the link between art and function. “Albers made materials ‘functional’ on their own terms. For her diploma piece for the Bauhaus, she designed a sound-proofing fabric that was made for the Trade Union School’s auditorium.”
Marianne Brandt broke boundaries by being given a space to work in the metal school, a discipline previously restricted to men. Eventually, she rose to become head of the metalwork department in 1928. Today, her designs are some of the most respected works associated with the Bauhaus. You may not know her name, but you’ll recognise items such as her Kandem bedside table lamp, which became of one of the most commercially successfully designs to come out of the school.
Then there was Gunta Stölzl, who helmed the weaving department between 1926 to 1931 and made beautiful, complex textiles. Though forced to flee Germany for having a Jewish husband when the Nazis took over – the regime also led to the eventual closing of the Bauhaus school – she continued to make popular carpets and textiles from Zurich. She talked of wanting to make pieces for a “new style of life”. Other textile experts included Benita Koch-Otte, Otti Berger and Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. The last was one of the few women to move from weaving into the male-dominated wood-sculpture department. There, she excelled at toy making and her small ship-building game, which features various blocks and forms in primary colours, is still in production today.
Then there’s Gertrud Arndt, who like many of the other Bauhaus women, arrived at the school with high ambitions to be an architect, but was despatched to the weaving school. Later, she taught herself photography and produced a set of self-portraits entitled Mask Portraits, which long predate the mask-themed works of feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman. They show her acting out a range of traditional female roles while wearing various veils and hats. She’s the femme fatale, the sweet little girl, the respectable lady, the stoical widow. It was a performance of gender – a telling reference to the arbitrary way we declare things ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and in turn limit their possibility.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 60, out now.