Bauhaus Bodies

Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School

Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501344787
• eBook ISBN: 9781501344800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

A century after the Bauhaus's founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school. Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular. In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond.

Part I

The Bauhaus in Weimar and Beyond: Gendered Bodies and the Search for Utopia

1

Soft Skills and Hard Facts: A Systematic Assessment of the Inclusion of Women at the Bauhaus

Patrick Rössler and Anke Blümm

Even more than in the case of their male counterparts, many women studying at the Bauhaus distinguished themselves from other females of their generation. Both in terms of education and lifestyle, the institution differed substantially from what other environments offered to young people of their age. Because of this, scholarly literature on gender at the Bauhaus has largely taken a critical perspective on the institution’s internal policies, particularly in relation to the role of women at the school. In her groundbreaking study on The Gendered World of the Bauhaus, Anja Baumhoff identified patterns of male power that structured the opportunities of students. To summarize her argument, Gropius’s ideological foundation at least of the early Bauhaus followed the tradition of the medieval Bauhütte (or stonemasons’ guild), with self-discipline as a guiding principle and a collectivism that required complete subordination of students.¹ The orientation towards craftsmanship marginalized women,² and despite the fact that even early Bauhaus programs claimed to enroll and educate students regardless of their sex,³ the institution’s policies did otherwise. Baumhoff identified a “hidden agenda” of Gropius and the Masters’ Council (Meisterrat) to reduce the high number of female students as well as their participation in the higher-esteemed workshops (such as carpentry) and to curtail their artistic ambitions. By contrast, a special Women’s Class was founded as early as 1920,⁴ and it soon merged with the weaving workshop. This was regarded predominantly as a conceptually “soft” area that kept women away from “hard” work in traditional male employment.⁵ Moreover, it did not allow the weavers to become professional craftsmen and guild members, as the Weimar Chamber of Crafts did not have a weaving department; thus no guild titles were awarded in this particular area.⁶

For this work, Baumhoff drew on a wealth of materials preserved in the official archives of the Thuringian State, which hold all records of the Bauhaus (as a governmental institution), from Gropius’s personal archive administered at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, and from correspondence of former Bauhaus students and additional interviews. These materials yield a picture that depicts the Bauhaus as, in her words, a “pedagogical environment that was not progressive in gender terms,” one which preserved “conventional social form and values […] and hierarchies within the school that revealed a web of paternalism, authority, power, and gender inequalities.”⁷

The picture is, however, not as clear-cut as this summary suggests. Baumhoff herself points out that several women deliberately (and successfully) adapted to the male-dominated structures, while others felt quite comfortable in the women’s areas, which allowed them to avoid competition with their male fellow students.⁸ Gunta Stölzl, for instance, later recalled that the founding of the Women’s Class was initiated by the young female students themselves.⁹ The example of her own life and work also suggests that, in some cases, the ambitions of female Bauhaus members themselves were directed—quite conservatively—more towards marriage and motherhood than to their own creative or artistic work.¹⁰ In general, it seems that a profound dedication was a prerequisite for living up to Gropius’s ideals; he believed that from the large body of Bauhaus members, only a small number of talented and ambitious (and probably male) students would be suited to reach the highest level of artistic expression.¹¹

Not surprisingly, of the six students who managed to achieve appointment as masters, as Bauhaus professors were called, but with the qualifier of “junior” before this title (Jungmeister); five were male and only one, Gunta Stölzl, was female. She was assigned, of course, to the weaving workshop.¹² Yet despite its somewhat marginalized status, the weaving workshop itself contributed fundamentally to modernist design at the Bauhaus; with its abstract patterns, it paralleled developments in other workshops (as well as in the art world in general) and was part of the Bauhaus’s success in the consumers’ world of Weimar Germany.¹³

In recent years further scholarship, based primarily on biographical work on particular female artists, has enhanced our understanding of the role women played at the Bauhaus.

Digging deeper into the lives and oeuvres of, for instance, Gertrud Arndt,¹⁴ Marianne Brandt,¹⁵ Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp,¹⁶ Ivana Tomljenovich-Meller,¹⁷ Irene Bayer-Hecht,¹⁸ Lucia Moholy,¹⁹ Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain,²⁰ Alma Siedhoff-Buscher,²¹ or Ricarda Schwerin²²—to name just a few—has raised awareness of the exceptional creativity of women at the Bauhaus without neglecting the structural barriers these women faced. Yet all studies on the distribution of power within the institution still lack a firm base for their arguments that goes beyond these exemplary lives. Almost two decades ago, Baumhoff had already remarked on the lack of available specific information on the gender distribution of students participating in various workshops, and on the overall representation of women in different areas of Bauhaus life.²³

In this essay, we will provide basic, essential data on the representation of women at the Bauhaus, making use of a comprehensive systematic overview of Bauhaus members that goes beyond the seminal 1990 work of Folke Dietzsch, who was the first to systematically collect data on Bauhaus members that was suitable for statistical analysis.²⁴ In a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over a period of four years,²⁵ members of our team completed in-depth biographical research in archives, collections, and publications in order to identify all people who had a formal relationship to the Bauhaus and can thus be counted among the total number of Bauhäusler or Bauhaus members. Based on this research, we were able to enter information on more than 1,400 individuals into a database, allowing for an in-depth analysis through strategies of descriptive statistics. Our results give, for instance, an insight into the numbers of women present in different periods of Bauhaus history, in the different workshops, and with regard to different social networks and circles of friendship. Our essay will also include information on the Bauhäusler as a whole, because the data on women need a larger framework for an insightful interpretation.

The Bauhaus Student Body: A Formal Description

Since the time when the Bauhaus first became the focus of intense academic interest in the 1960s, a range of methodological approaches have been applied to its study. While significant bodies of research exist on the Bauhaus masters’ oeuvres, the institution’s structure, its pedagogical innovation, or the product design emerging from the workshops, we still know little about those without whom the Bauhaus would not have been possible: the student body as a whole—those Bauhäusler who learned at and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Images
• Introduction: Embodying the Bauhaus Elizabeth Otto
• Part I The Bauhaus in Weimar and Beyond: Gendered Bodies and the Search for Utopia
• 1 Soft Skills and Hard Facts: A Systematic Assessment of the Inclusion of Women at the Bauhaus Patrick Rössler and Anke Blümm
• 2 “Bodies Drilled in Freedom”: Nudity, Body Culture, and Classical Gymnastics at the Early Bauhaus Ute Ackermann
• 3 The Spiritual Enhancement of the Body: Johannes Itten, Gertrud Grunow, and Mazdaznan at the Early Bauhaus Linn Burchert
• 4 Utopias of a New Society: Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Loheland and Schwarzerden Women’s Communes Sandra Neugärtner
• 5 Invisible Bodies and Empty Spaces: Notes on Gender at the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition Paul Monty Paret
• Part II A New Unity? Technologies and Techniques of Gender
• 6 Clothing Bauhaus Bodies Kathleen James-Chakraborty
• 7 Paul Klee and the New Woman Dancer: Gret Palucca, Karla Grosch, and the Gendering of Constructivism Susan Funkenstein
• 8 Ise Gropius: “Everyone Here Calls me Frau Bauhaus” Mercedes Valdivieso
• 9 Dörte Helm, Margaret Leiteritz, and Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp: Rare Women of the Bauhaus Wall-Painting Workshop Morgan Ridler
• 10 Androgyny in Oskar Schlemmer’s Figural Art Deborah Ascher Barnstone
• Part III Identities and Ideologies in Bauhaus Photography and New Media
• 11 Disorder or Subordination? On Gender Relations in Bauhaus Photographs Burcu Dogramaci
• 12 Bauhaus Double Portraits Karen Koehler
• 13 “A School for Becoming Human”: The Socialist Humanism of Irene Blühová’s Bauhaus Photographs Julia Secklehner
• 14 Breuer’s New Women Jordan Troeller
• Contributors
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright