Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective

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Marguerite Friedlaender Wildenhain

Portrait of Marguerite Friedlaender Wildenhain at the wheel, decorating a bowl with a slip trailer, Het Kruikje (The Little Pot) pottery in Putten, Holland, mid 1930s

Born: Marguerite Friedlaender, October 11, 1896, Lyon, France

Died: February 24, 1985, Guerneville, California, USA

Matriculated: 1919

Locations: France, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, USA, Central and South America

Through her work and teaching in Germany, Holland, and the United States of America, Marguerite Friedlaender Wildenhain was a leader in creating a Bauhaus approach to ceramics—durable, practical, and elegantly simple—and disseminating these ideas to new generations. Born in France to a German father and English mother, she was always a citizen of the world. She was raised trilingually and attended high schools in Lyons, Berlin, and the British Folkestone School for Girls. In 1914, she returned to Berlin to study at the College of Applied Arts (Hochschule für angewandte Kunst) and, in 1916, she did porcelain decor design for a manufacturer in Rudolstadt. After completing the Bauhaus preliminary course (Vorkurs) in spring 1920, Friedlaender became one of the first ceramics students. As Lydia Driesch-Foucar later recalled, the workshop was a sad little room in a furnace factory with a single potter’s wheel and a clay crate. Friedlander led a troop of five students to a skilled potter in nearby Dornburg, Max Krehan, who agreed to take them on. Gropius also agreed, and the ceramics workshop was founded. Krehan demanded long days to learn their craft properly; Friedlaender was forever grateful for his high standards and excellent teaching. Krehan died in 1924, and only the 2007 publication of Friedlaender’s journal of letters written to him posthumously revealed that the two had been lovers. Sculptor Gerhard Marcks, the workshop’s master of form, was also a strong influence on Friedlaender and became her lifelong friend. Few of her works from this period survive, but a stoneware jug with slip-trailed decoration, Cow and Steer, shows her early mastery of earthy expressionism. She was completely dedicated to her studies at Dornburg and in July 1922, she passed her journeyman’s examination (Gesellenprüfung). But when the Weimar Bauhaus closed in 1924, the ceramics workshop shut for good.

Marguerite Friedlaender Wildenhain, Henkelkrug mit Schlickermalerei (handle jug with slip decoration), 1922/1923

Porzellan für die neue Wohnung (Porcelain for the New Dwelling), advertisement in the journal Die Schaulade 6 (1930)

Another progressive school, Burg Giebichenstein School of Art and Design (Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule) in Halle, hired Friedlaender at the suggestion of Gerhard Marcks, who also worked there. In 1926 she passed her master craftsman exam (Meisterprüfung) and became the head of the ceramics department (Leiterin der Keramikabteilung), a first for a woman in Germany. In 1929, she began to achieve the Bauhaus goal of mass-manufactured ceramics, first by having a test kiln for porcelain constructed in the workshop and then through cooperation with Berlin’s Royal Porcelain Manufacture (Königliche Porzellanmanufaktur, KPM), which produced her Hallesche Form service that year. An advertisement for the set calls it porcelain for the new dwelling, a catchphrase of the era that, as in Hans Richter’s film, likewise titled Die neue Wohnung, highlighted the pressing need for affordable modern housing with functional interior design. Friedlaender’s unornamented finish evokes the functional and highlights the beauty of the set’s forms. Its timelessness may account for the fact that, despite Friedlaender’s Jewish heritage, KPM continued to produce it during the Nazi period, albeit without Friedlaender’s name attached. She also developed innovative designs for use in the emerging airline industry.

Friedlaender married Franz Wildenhain in 1930, a former Bauhäusler and, in Halle, her student and assistant. In 1933, Marguerite Wildenhain lost her position at Burg Giebichenstein. She traveled to her parents’ home, now in Switzerland, and, on their advice, decided to move to Holland, where she and Franz set up the Het Kruikje (The Little Pot) ceramics workshop in Putten. Their wares sold well, including to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. In 1937 Marguerite Wildenhain again partnered with industry; together with De Sphinx in Maastricht she created the Five O’Clock tea set commissioned by the Dutch government for Paris’s Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life), where it was awarded a silver medal. But with the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Marguerite Wildenhain was on the move again. She fled to the USA, a process facilitated by her French citizenship. A German national, Franz was unable to accompany her. They would be reunited only in 1947 and divorce in 1950.

Marguerite Wildenhain moved to California, where she taught first at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, and then at the artists’ colony of Pond Farm. She was awarded numerous prizes for her work as outstanding west-coast potter of the year in 1954 and 1963 and awarded an honorary doctorate at Luther College. She wrote books on her life and studies, and traveled to Black Mountain College in 1952, and annually to Central and South America. Until 1980, every summer she taught young ceramicists how to master wheel-thrown pottery at Pond Farm, where she felt truly at home and lived out her days.

Gertrud Grunow

Portrait of Gertrud Grunow, c. 1940

Born: July 8, 1870, Berlin, Germany

Died: June 11, 1944, Leverkusen, Germany

Employed: 1919

Locations: Germany, UK, Switzerland

While the Bauhaus is not usually remembered for its musicians, one of them, Gertrud Grunow, was among its most influential early teachers. Rather than art works or musical compositions, Grunow contributed a philosophical approach to creativity and the body called Harmonisierungslehre (Theory of Harmonization). This was aimed at nothing less than the full integration of the senses through movement exercises and the learned perception of synesthetic equivalences among sound, color, form, and movement. Bauhäusler Else Mögelin would later recall Grunow’s enthusiastic instructions in class to dance the color blue! A series of photographs shows a Grunow student holding poses. From left to right they are: the note e and the color white; the same note perceived in a different relationship to the color green-blue; and, finally, the note a paired blue-violet, which sets the dance in motion. Although too little remains of Grunow’s legacy, traces of her influence on the early Bauhaus are everywhere. A widely circulated 1923 chart of Bauhaus instruction—published in the 1923 catalogue for the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar exhibition—shows her class as the basis of all studies.

Grunow was born in Berlin and studied music with renowned composers, conductors, and pianists including Hans Guido von Bülow and the brothers Philipp and Xaver Scharwenka. In 1914, she began to develop her own theories and, in 1919, to teach this system, first in Berlin and Jena before she came to the Bauhaus on the recommendation of Johannes Itten that same year. Grunow taught on contract but in many ways functioned as a master; she was present at some of the Masters’ Council meetings, where her assessments of students’ abilities were key considerations in deciding if they could advance beyond the preliminary course. Further, in the 1923 catalogue, she is listed alphabetically, right after Walter Gropius, among the masters of form, the most prominent of the Bauhaus teachers. Paul Klee’s son Felix, who grew up at the Bauhaus from age fourteen, would later recall Grunow as Seelenhüterin (the soul guardian of the Bauhaus).

Grunow was the only female instructor who contributed an essay to the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar catalogue; The Creation of Living Form through Color, Form, and Sound was the first to appear after Gropius’s own essay, even before those of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In it, Grunow explains that sight and, above all, sound are the most important senses, and that the human body is a perceiving instrument that must be brought into harmony. Colors, she explains, are not merely appearances to the eye but living force, and the circle is the most universal and fundamental form. In a place where all endeavors are directed toward reconstruction and companionship in liveliest reciprocation with the world, as in the Bauhaus, the cultivation of independence, born in the subconscious, will, as beginning and constant aid, not be dispensable, she wrote.

A pupil of Gertrud Grunow, 1917 or 1922

With the Bauhaus’s shift in focus away from the spiritual to the technological, and the related 1923 departure of Grunow’s greatest ally, Itten, her stock declined, and the Masters’ Council voted not to extend her contract beyond spring 1924. Grunow spent her later years teaching in Hamburg, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland before returning to Germany. Through her and her students’ few publications, it is possible to partially reconstruct her theories of the body, perception, and creativity that so strongly influenced the early Bauhaus.

Gunta Stölzl

by Ulrike Müller and Ingrid Radewaldt

Gunta Stölzl, Dessau Bauhaus, 1927–1928

Born: Adelgunde Stölzl, March 5, 1897, Munich, Germany

Died: April 22, 1983, Küsnacht, Switzerland

Matriculated: 1919

Locations: Germany, Switzerland

Gunta Stölzl goes down in history as the only female Bauhaus master. From 1926, she served as a workshop master (Werkmeisterin), and from 1927 to 1931, as the technical and artistic director of the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau. She turned the least respected area of nineteenth-century decorative arts—weaving—into modern industrial textile design; in so doing, she achieved a level of productivity not previously seen at the Bauhaus. The basis for this was her lifelong desire to weave—to design things out of material, and her particular talent for translating complex compositions into, on the one hand, the most sophisticated hand-woven works and, on the other, innovative prototypes for mechanical production. Moreover, as a teacher, she paved the way for a series of weavers and textile designers who went on to achieve international success. She elevated improvisation and experimentation, making them fixed components of the learning process, and consistently motivated her students to grab hold of the rope of industriousness with team spirit and passion.

Born Adelgunde Stölzl in 1897, her family placed a high value on education: her great-grandfather had himself been a weaving master, and her father was active in the education reform. In Munich in 1913, she had taken her high school examination (Reifeprüfung)—still uncommon at that time—at the higher girls’ school (Höhere Töchterschule) and then studied at the School of Applied Arts in Munich for seven semesters, with classes including glass painting and ceramics. Her most important teacher there was the school’s director, the art reformer Richard Riemerschmid.

However, after the First World War, not only did buildings and streets lay in ruins but also hopes and life plans; there was too much sorrow, too much misery caused by the war, too many dead. Stölzl’s generation had grown up too fast and looked at the world through critical eyes. To Stölzl the school of applied arts now seemed too parochial and conservative. The living and working ideal presented in the Bauhaus Manifesto, by contrast, was very different and added to the reforms promised to women by the newly founded Weimar Republic. Stölzl decided to make a fresh start and applied.

The drawings in her Bauhaus application portfolio show Stölzl’s sensitive observation and artistic talent. Many works relate to the events of the war as witnessed from her harrowing perspective as a Red Cross nurse from 1917 to 1918. Gropius accepted her without hesitation in 1919, prompting the student’s enthusiastic diary entry: Nothing stands in the way of my outer life; I can have a hand in shaping it however I want. Oh, how often I’ve dreamt of it, and now it’s really come true; I still can’t believe it. Even as a young girl, she had had a passion for writing. That her diary entries and letters are today so valuable and authentic is thanks to her lifelong efforts to perceive the outside world in the same open, truthful, discriminating, and critical manner as she did the rich but contradictory world of her own emotions. In the process, she developed a keen sense for social moods: she was one of the first to voice criticism of the anti-Semitic conflicts in the Bauhaus’s early days.

Gunta Stölzl, Untitled, 1920, watercolor, pen-and-ink, and opaque white over pencil on paper

Starting in the weaving workshop—declared a Frauenklasse (women’s class) by Gropius in 1920—Helene Börner, who had been employed as a Werkmeister, was ruthlessly despised by Stölzl as a needlework teacher of the oldest style. As her classmate Anni Albers later recalled: At the beginning, we didn’t learn anything. I learned a lot from Gunta, who was a great teacher. We would sit there and just give it a try. Proactive creativity was required, very much in keeping with the teachings of the instructor of the preliminary course (Vorkurs), Johannes Itten, who wanted to appeal to all the senses and encouraged the students’ individual