Bauhaus. - Bauhaus women: a global perspective

Weavers on the Bauhaus staircase, 1927. Top to bottom: Gunta Stlzl (left), Ljuba Monastirskaja (right), Grete Reichardt (left), Otti Berger (right), Elisabeth Mller (light patterned jumper), Rosa Berger (dark jumper), Lis Beyer-Volger (center, white collar), Lena Meyer-Bergner (left), Ruth Holls (far right), and Elisabeth Oestreicher

With the founding of the Bauhaus coming directly after the First World War, its first generation of students and mastersas professors were calledhad 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 Germanys 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 schools 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 dietfortunately catered to by the early Bauhaus cafeteria.

Bauhaus party, Ilmschlsschen tavern, Weimar, November 29, 1924

The essential ideological shift away from expressionism at the Bauhaus was made manifest in the schools first major exhibition, Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, held during the summer of 1923. It was already evident in Gropiuss speeches the previous year and in Ittens 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 furnitureincluding the famous tubular steel chairswallpaper, 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. Gropiuss 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 Miess 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 countrys 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 Bauhuslermany of whom were of Jewish descent and left-leaningoften found themselves in difficult positions, either silenced or pushed into exile.

Under Nazism it became starkly evident that Bauhaus womennewer as a group to the art, design, and building scene and fewer in numberhad 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.