Women of Bauhaus
6 Mar 2025 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneYouTube showed me a video called Bauhaus Women about the female artists and designers associated with the Bauhaus school and movement in 1930s Germany.
I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to learn that basically every famous male name associated with it was kinda a piece of shit. If this documentary is correct (I'm thinking I'll have to buy at least one book about this now) then:
Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky both believed that women couldn't do fine art, only crafts, because they don't have the "creative genius" required, and they didn't want to teach them art. (Possibly their fragility was encouraged by the success of female art students in the first year, including Jewish polymath Friedl Dicker, who was later killed at Auschwitz.) (Yeah, it was the 30s, other artists thought this, but not even all the followers of the official Academy styles thought that anymore at this point. So it's even more embarrassing.)
Walter Gropius (founder, boss, ground-breaking architect) initially had very utopian ideals and threw open student recruitment emphasizing gender equality, but after they got more female than male students to begin with, he got SGA/Supernatural syndrome, or at least worried that his and the school's funding and reputation would suffer if they were seen as too female, and made new rules limiting female students to the study of weaving only and announcing that female brains couldn't think in 3D and were not suited for architecture and design. This didn't stop him from making exceptions for female designers whose work was bringing money and media attention to the school.
The lone female professor (of weaving), Gunta Stölzl, was only hired after agitation and campaigning by the students, even though she was running the weaving workshop and for years had been responsible for it bringing in more money than any other department. She still was never given benefits or a permanent contract.
Many of the most commercially successful designers were women (Marianne Brandt, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher) and were pushed out once they married or had children.
All the most famous photographs of the school and in the contemporary catalogs were taken by Lucia Moholy, wife of professor László Moholy-Nagy, for free apparently, and when she had to flee the country due to being Jewish many of her negatives were left behind. She then spent decades battling Gropius for her copyright.
Now, these stories are, after all, not that shocking for the 1930s and university settings. But the Bauhaus was set apart, from its conception and all its self-advertisement as a representative of the progressive wave of modernity, besides explicitly recruiting women with promises that were later walked back. It was full of free love, just not freedom to study architecture and metalwork (Marianne Brandt was given an exemption to do that).
I was struck when watching this by the comparison with William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement. As discussed in this post, there were many ideological similarities between the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus movement, and historical ones too, ie that the designers' ideas about the democratization of art and design, designing beautiful and functional objects for the homes of ordinary people, were ironically lost very quickly, with fashion and manufacturing costs leading them to end up making trendy fashionable overpriced objects for the bourgeois instead, even though in the case of Bauhaus the other big element of the ideology is industrial design. This happened even though they were mass-produced!
William Morris's daughter May was a major designer for Morris & Co in the Victorian/Edwardian era, and she was not the only prolific woman designer employed there before the foundation of the Bauhaus. I have not read much on the history of the company, but at first glance it looks like female artist representation is at least slightly better in the Arts & Crafts movement than in the Bauhaus, and that's. Well.
I do not yet have time to replace all my Klee and Kandinsky etc icons with icons of the work of female avant garde artists, but I am feeling the impulse.
I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to learn that basically every famous male name associated with it was kinda a piece of shit. If this documentary is correct (I'm thinking I'll have to buy at least one book about this now) then:
Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky both believed that women couldn't do fine art, only crafts, because they don't have the "creative genius" required, and they didn't want to teach them art. (Possibly their fragility was encouraged by the success of female art students in the first year, including Jewish polymath Friedl Dicker, who was later killed at Auschwitz.) (Yeah, it was the 30s, other artists thought this, but not even all the followers of the official Academy styles thought that anymore at this point. So it's even more embarrassing.)
Walter Gropius (founder, boss, ground-breaking architect) initially had very utopian ideals and threw open student recruitment emphasizing gender equality, but after they got more female than male students to begin with, he got SGA/Supernatural syndrome, or at least worried that his and the school's funding and reputation would suffer if they were seen as too female, and made new rules limiting female students to the study of weaving only and announcing that female brains couldn't think in 3D and were not suited for architecture and design. This didn't stop him from making exceptions for female designers whose work was bringing money and media attention to the school.
The lone female professor (of weaving), Gunta Stölzl, was only hired after agitation and campaigning by the students, even though she was running the weaving workshop and for years had been responsible for it bringing in more money than any other department. She still was never given benefits or a permanent contract.
Many of the most commercially successful designers were women (Marianne Brandt, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher) and were pushed out once they married or had children.
All the most famous photographs of the school and in the contemporary catalogs were taken by Lucia Moholy, wife of professor László Moholy-Nagy, for free apparently, and when she had to flee the country due to being Jewish many of her negatives were left behind. She then spent decades battling Gropius for her copyright.
Now, these stories are, after all, not that shocking for the 1930s and university settings. But the Bauhaus was set apart, from its conception and all its self-advertisement as a representative of the progressive wave of modernity, besides explicitly recruiting women with promises that were later walked back. It was full of free love, just not freedom to study architecture and metalwork (Marianne Brandt was given an exemption to do that).
I was struck when watching this by the comparison with William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement. As discussed in this post, there were many ideological similarities between the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus movement, and historical ones too, ie that the designers' ideas about the democratization of art and design, designing beautiful and functional objects for the homes of ordinary people, were ironically lost very quickly, with fashion and manufacturing costs leading them to end up making trendy fashionable overpriced objects for the bourgeois instead, even though in the case of Bauhaus the other big element of the ideology is industrial design. This happened even though they were mass-produced!
William Morris's daughter May was a major designer for Morris & Co in the Victorian/Edwardian era, and she was not the only prolific woman designer employed there before the foundation of the Bauhaus. I have not read much on the history of the company, but at first glance it looks like female artist representation is at least slightly better in the Arts & Crafts movement than in the Bauhaus, and that's. Well.
I do not yet have time to replace all my Klee and Kandinsky etc icons with icons of the work of female avant garde artists, but I am feeling the impulse.
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Date: 6 Mar 2025 03:02 pm (UTC)Feminism: The proposition that women are human beings. Still just too much for some fragile menfolk.
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Date: 7 Mar 2025 09:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
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