Bauhaus Online | Magazin

Eyes of light wandering like stars

Georg Graeser — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:01:40 +0000

Below the earth lies sleep
Above the earth, the dream
But between sleep and dream
I see eyes of light wandering like stars.

The young painter Heinz Trökes, banned by the Nazis, copied these lines from Jean Paul Richter on the flyleaf of one of his first sketchbooks in 1943 [1]. It evidently indicated a true affinity – and not only during the period of ‘inner emigration’ under the Nazis, since a critic was able to note 20 years later, almost in paraphrase: ‘In Trökes’s pictures we reach an intermediate poetic realm in which what is real and what is imagined are no longer in contradiction, in which pure poetry enters the perceptible world as a visible event.’ [2].

But this does not fully account for Trökes stylistically. He was a distinct pluralist, changeable and open to many contemporary art movements. For example, he protested against being regarded purely as a Surrealist during the postwar period, although he had eagerly taken up aspects of Surrealism during the 1940s and its influence on his paintings during that period is obvious. After all, he had lived in Paris for a time and moved in André Breton’s circle. He also used Surrealist techniques throughout his life, such as automatic, unconscious pictorial creation. Many of his works were developed from the first contact of paint with the white canvas by continuing random patterns and shapes across the surface.

The origins of these creative techniques, as well as his artistic versatility, can now be appreciated in an exhibition in Weimar at which the artist’s early work, from 1933 to 1948, is being shown for the first time. More than 90 works from the artist’s estate cover the various biographical and artistic periods: his period of training at the Itten school in Krefeld, his work as a textile designer, the period in which he was banned from working or exhibiting by the Nazis starting in 1937 and his underground artistic career, right down to his leading role in the cultural reconstruction of war-torn Germany after 1945. Trökes was one of the founders of the Gerd Rosen Gallery in Berlin, and in 1947/48 he introduced the preliminary course at the State College in Weimar (the successor institution to the Weimar Bauhaus), directed by Hermann Henselmann.

Studies by Trökes on rhythm, nature, and colour from the preliminary course in Krefeld can also be seen. These show considerable similarity to the basic course at the Bauhaus. Other works, ranging from decorative textile designs to ‘free’ Surrealist or naïve paintings, are also on show.

After the war, Heinz Trökes quickly developed a successful career as a gallery owner and artist and was soon among ‘the most versatile, independent and expansive painters in postwar German modernism’ [3]. His work continued from that of the pre-Nazi avant-garde, but also represented developments in art that he had missed out on after 1933, as well as contemporary ones. He took part in the first postwar Biennale in Venice as early as 1948, and in documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955. Although he was an influential networker on the art scene, he usually lived reclusively in Ibiza after 1952 in a house with neither electricity nor a phone; he undertook extensive travels all over the world. However, this did not prevent him from teaching at the academies of art in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin from 1956 onward. He was appointed as a member of the Academy of Arts in 1961. He died in Berlin on 22 April 1997.

The exhibition ‘Heinz Trökes: the Early Years’ is being held from 15 March to 2 June 2013, on the occasion of the centenary of the artist’s birth, at the Haus Am Horn – the model house that belonged to Bauhaus member Georg Muche, with whom Trökes was a master-class student in 1940. A catalogue is being published to accompany the exhibition.

For further information on Heinz Trökes, see www.troekes.de

[1] Lothar Romain: Heinz Trökes. Die Lichtaugen zwischen Schlaf und Traum. In: Künstler. Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwart. München 1993. S. 3.
[2] Werner Haftmann in: Künstler. Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwart. S. 11.
[3] Markus Krause: Einheit in Vielfalt. Zum Stilpluralismus im Werk von Heinz Trökes. In: Heinz Trökes. Werke und Dokumente. Hrsg. v. Archiv für Bildende Kunst im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. Ausst. Kat. Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Nürnberg/Neues Museum Weimar/Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. Nürnberg 2003. S. 23.

Bauhaus Classics: Tall lidded pot with scored decoration

Michael Siebenbrodt — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:30:48 +0000

Before switching in 1920 to the ceramics workshop at the Bauhaus in Dornburg, Otto Lindig had already studied at the Grand-Ducal Applied Arts College under Henry van de Velde starting in 1913, and starting in 1915 had studied sculpture at the Grand-Ducal Academy of Art and at the Bauhaus in Weimar with Richard Engelmann.
The tall lidded pot with etched decoration was the apprenticeship piece with which he successfully completed his training in 1922. He started making his first ceramic pieces using a casting technique in 1923 with the L1 combination teapot. In his apprenticeship piece, Lindig combines his sculptural experience with traditional pottery techniques, including even the scoring technique, which was already in use during the Neolithic period. The body of the pot recalls a portly male figure, amusingly completed by a lid resembling a hat. The shining yellow glaze further accentuates the work’s lively aura; Lindig used the same glaze in other ceramic pieces.
In 1924, Lindig was made responsible first for the technical and later for the commercial management of the Bauhaus’s Stables Workshop in Dornburg.

Michael Siebenbrodt is curator at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar.

The Bauhaus on the Ganges

Ingolf Kern — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 08:14:01 +0000

Calcutta – a location for the early twentieth-century avant-garde? An exhibition was held on the premises of the Indian Society of Oriental Art in 1922 in which works by Bauhaus artists were seen for the first time in the subcontinent, alongside works by Indian avant-garde artists. The link leading to this unusual encounter was a common interest in the artistic languages of Cubism, Primitivism, and abstraction. The exhibition in Calcutta is thus an interesting case of internationalized cultural production in a delicate balance between the global avant-garde and cultural difference.
The story of how the exhibition came to India is being told in the exhibition ‘The Bauhaus in Calcutta: an Encounter between Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes’ in Dessau, starting on 27 March. Ingolf Kern spoke to the exhibition’s curators, Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg.

At the Bauhaus in Dessau, you are commemorating the first Bauhaus exhibition in India 90 years ago. How did the event come about, and what was shown at it?

The exhibition of modern avant-garde art was held on the premises of the Indian Society of Oriental Art in 1922. Alongside works by Indian avant-garde artists such as Uma Prosad Mookerjee, Shanta Devi, Sunanyani Devi and Gaganendranath Tagore, works by Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Georg Muche and Wassily Kandinsky were also shown. It is not clear to what extent the origins of the exhibition can be traced back to a visit to Weimar made by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921, and his contacts with the Bauhaus are also unclear. There was of course a certain amount of enthusiasm for India at the Bauhaus in Weimar. During the period between the wars, there were many artists and intellectuals who projected their hopes onto the subcontinent.

Why was that?

For a society in which rationalization and industrialization were regarded as having led to war and destruction, and which was hoping that Eastern spirituality would offer an alternative to these fits of modernization, India was seen as a refuge. People were reading works by Rabindranath Tagore, and Indian religion and philosophy formed an important basis for Johannes Itten’s teaching work. At the same time, a new intellectual milieu was emerging in late colonial India, with the Tagore family forming its core. The naturalism prescribed by the colonial power, which had successfully driven out local art forms and pictorial traditions, was being rejected and educational reforms were also taking place, with the foundation of new art schools starting in 1900. With the return to local formal languages and craftwork methods in the workshops, many parallels can be seen between the Bauhaus’s aims in educational reform and those of Tagore’s university in Santiniketan.

What was it that interested the Bauhaus members in the Indian situation at that time?

The founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar has to be seen in the context of the First World War – after all, most of those involved had the shattering experiences of the trenches behind them, and the Weimar Republic itself was a highly explosive and polarized society. For Europeans who were tired of rationalism, India represented something to yearn for, against this background. They regarded it as still possessing a spiritual unity between body and soul, nature and spirit. Examples that might be mentioned include the Theosophical Society, the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, the popularity of Tagore’s writings, and Rudolf Steiner. Johannes Itten’s college of art in Vienna provided a crystallization point for this scene before he moved to Weimar.

It was a matter of exploring the language of forms, as well as comparing different teaching approaches in the avant-garde colleges in Germany and India. What conclusions did the exhibition reach?

It was a sales exhibition showing works of European and Indian avant-garde art. To that extent, it was important for an international art market that was being well supplied by artists such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. The interesting aspect of the exhibition is that it can be seen as a crystallization point for a realm of art production that had already become transnational.

Internationalized art production is quite normal nowadays, but that was not the case back then. What effects did the exhibition have on the subsequent development of artistic languages?

For us, it was surprising to see how intensively artistic production had already been integrated into international exchanges and interactions between different positions and formal languages, even in the early twentieth century. These existing networks and international relations encountered each other at the exhibition. What became clear – and this is what the phrase ‘laboratory for the transcultural avant-garde’ means – was that this international sphere of lively cultural exchange was a decisive prerequisite for artistic production by the avant-garde. To that extent, the exhibition is also a fascinating case that encourages us to rethink art history as a kind of interlinked ‘world art history’ – away from the Eurocentric point of view that prefers to work with concepts such as ‘influences’.

What can the visitor to Dessau expect? Specifically, is the 1922 exhibition simply being reconstructed on a one to one basis, or are you also inquiring into the patterns of the global art business today?

The word ‘reconstruction’ would probably be rather misleading. Instead, we want to start with what has survived from the exhibition. We’ll be taking up approaches and concepts that are associated with the exhibition in the literature – for example, ‘transnational encounter’ and ‘co-produced Modernism’. Then we’ll try to assign these concepts to the exhibits. Visitors will be able to see historic documents, letters, photographs, and also works of art that were already shown in 1922. In this way, we are trying to convey some of the relationships and fascinating encounters that took place in Calcutta. As the Indian exhibition is also associated with a great deal of speculation, due to the state of the sources, our approach to it has also meant a certain amount of detective work. We have constantly been finding open-ended outcomes after accidental meetings within cosmopolitan networks and metropolitan cultures, and noticing surprising dialogues between different types of artistic production that the exhibition may have led to. For the curators, the exhibition has thus ultimately also involved a search process as well – but an extremely fascinating one.

Exhibition dates

The Bauhaus in Calcutta: an Encounter between Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes
27 March to 30 June
Bauhaus Building, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Entrance € 6 / € 4 reduced rate (including permanent exhibition)
Further information: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

The tectonics of Atlantis

Georg Gräser — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:50:56 +0000

If Andreas Feininger’s photos are to be believed, New York in the 1940s was a tidy, clean city with all the freshness of early dawn. World war, social conflict, unemployment and the Depression are all far away. The city and its surroundings seem to have been created not by human beings, but by its own internal structure, by its tightly condensed clarity. Like each piece of scaffolding, each façade, the inhabitants form part of a crystalline structure that has a fascinatingly logical arrangement – a strict arrangement, but one that is bathed in a pleasant light. As when one looks into a mineral crystal in which ruptures and inclusions can be seen, depending on the viewing angle and the incidence of the light, enclosed but at the same time transparent, the photos offer a glimpse into the heart of the New World – urban panoramas, architectural details, building materials, harbour work, traffic and technology, crowds of people, businesses, street scenes and night clubs.

Like an emigrant arriving on the Hudson River, drawn in by the attraction of the city, the viewer is drawn in by the pictures and overwhelmed by their density, beauty, clarity and their striking material quality, with the depths and reflections of the light passing through every layer. The structure that underlies the appearance of New York remains mysterious, but its existence is beyond any doubt. Andreas Feininger wrote, ‘… I’m particularly interested in effect, structure and form in nature and in human creations that appear as part of a larger whole – i.e., city, landscape, industry, environment.’ [1]

Andreas Feininger arrived in New York from Sweden in 1939, escaping from war and totalitarianism. After crossing the flat expanses of the ocean, he arrived in the most high-rise, thriving metropolis in the world. Even as a boy, he had already developed an enthusiasm for the city from afar and had made preparations to go there using city plans, street maps and photographs. New York now became a reality for him, a new home for an American exile who could not actually speak any English. He met with members of his emigré family, and he and his wife Wysse moved into an apartment which they stayed in until 1981. Fortunately he quickly found employment through some of his earlier contacts – initially as a freelance photojournalist for the ‘Black Star’ photo agency and later with the famousLife Magazine,which signed him up full-time in 1943 and which he remained with for nearly 20 years.

Feininger had already started his ‘New York in the Forties’ photo series as a private project in the first few days after he arrived in New York. Although he sold several of the pictures to his employers, the project always primarily represented an independent exploration of his new home for him. ‘Whenever my job left me some time, I took the camera and went wandering day and night among New York’s fascinating streets, quays and bridges. I took photos of whatever struck me as being typical, interesting, or just beautiful.’ [2]

Andreas Feininger took photos without using montage or special effects; it was only in enlarged prints that he corrected any pictorial distortion. As a trained cabinet-maker, he was able to use his craft skills to adapt his photographic equipment to his own needs – for example, developing a tripod for his 40-inch telescopic lens. This enabled him to take photos that were extremely sharp, rich in detail and had a sculptural clarity. His view of New York is thus often a vista through the telephoto lens, with distances shrinking and pictorial elements condensed.

These photos, which are among the classics in the history of photography, have permanently shaped our view of New York. They can now be seen in the location where the young Andreas Feininger carried out his first photographic experiments in 1925 – the Masters’ Houses estate in Dessau. The Dessau Masters’ Houses Association (Förderverein Meisterhäuser Dessau) is presenting a selection of some 90 works in the exhibition ‘Andreas Feininger – New York in the Forties’. The exhibition, held on the occasion of the Kurt Weill Festival in collaboration with the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, is open from 25 February to 21 April in the Muche, Klee, Kandinsky and Feininger houses. The opening is on 24 February at 11 a.m. in the Muche House.

[1] Thomas Buchsteiner and Ursula Zeller, eds. Andreas Feininger. Ein Fotografenleben 1906–1999 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), p. 9.
[2] Andreas Feininger in: New York in the Forties (Weingarten 2001), p. 7.

„Actually, I wanted to become an architect ….“

Georg Gräser — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:14:14 +0000

... But when Gertrud Arndt came to the State Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, architecture was not yet included in the curriculum. She adapted herself to the circumstances and, following the compulsory preliminary course with Klee and Kandinsky, attended the weaving course – a gathering-place for women at the Bauhaus.

Arndt distinguished herself and designed numerous textile patterns that are still being successfully produced today; she also made at least four outstanding carpets. In 1924, her very first carpet was included in the Director’s Office ensemble for Walter Gropius – the ‘showroom’ at the Weimar Bauhaus. However, despite her gifts and success in textile design, Gertrud Arndt completely abandoned weaving in 1927, immediately after passing her final apprenticeship examination. Instead, she turned to photography. She had already gained some experience in architectural photography before coming to the Bauhaus and had purchased her own camera while studying in Dessau. From then on, she mainly produced self-portraits. The peak of her small photographic oeuvre consists of the ‘Mask Portraits’, a series of 43 self-portraits made from 1929 and 1931, which by her own account she started out of ‘boredom’. In these enigmatic images, Arndt dramatizes herself using only a few accessories, toying with disguise, hairstyle, gaze and facial expression.

When she left the Bauhaus in 1932 to move to Probstzella with her husband, Alfred Arndt, she also abandoned photography and ceased any creative work. She saw it from then on as being her duty to support her husband and his work as an architect. She was therefore surprised by the response that her photographic work met with in 1979 when it was exhibited at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. The exhibition brought her international recognition as a pioneer of the photographic self-portrait.

The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin is presenting the most extensive exhibition of her work to date, combining her textile art and photography for the first time. In addition to the photos and rare weaving and knotwork pieces – including a carpet commissioned by a Hamburg shipowner, Eberhard Thost (in 1927), now carefully restored – the exhibition includes textile designs, colour studies and works she produced in the preliminary course.

Further information is available on the web site of the Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin.

Exhibition dates

"Actually, I wanted to become an architect …". Gertrud Arndt: Weaver and Photographer at the Bauhaus, 1923–1931

30 January – 22 April 2013

Catalogue

A 128-page catalogue including 184 illustrations is being published to accompany the exhibition (€ 14.90).

Development plan for the new Bauhaus Museum in Weimar presented

Redaktion bauhaus-online.de — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:37:09 +0000

At a public meeting on 29 January 2013, the city of Weimar for the first time presented a development plan for the site of the new Bauhaus Museum. The plan envisages a change in street routes due to building over two sections of street and urban-planning adjustments to the surrounding area. Some 350 participants attended the meeting and voiced sometimes critical views on issues involving the planned traffic routing, the parking situation, the design of the area, expected costs, and the precise location and aesthetic appearance of the building.
The meeting formed part of the official planning procedure and ensures that the project is legally valid by providing public involvement at an early stage. The opinions expressed are being taken into account by the City of Weimar and will be considered jointly with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the architect.

The typical Bauhaus girl: Karla Grosch

Boris Friedewald — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:05:06 +0000

Karla Grosch came to the Bauhaus in Dessau in the summer semester of 1928 to work as the head of the female physical education course. Apart from Gunta Stölzl, the master of the Bauhaus weavery, Grosch was the only female teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau.

She was born in Weimar in 1904 and graduated as a dancer from the famous Gret Palucca in Dresden. At the Bauhaus, Grosch took also part in various stage performances, as for example in Oskar Schlemmer's "Glass dance" and "Metal dance", which premiered in the context of a guest performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin in 1929.

Grosch stayed at the Bauhaus until 1932. She was closely linked to the family of Paul Klee and lived in a room of Klee's master's house from 1928 until 1930. During her time at the Bauhaus, Grosch had a suspense-packed love affair with the actor Max Werner Lenz, who worked at the Theatre in Dessau at this time. At the beginning of 1933 pregnant Grosch moved with her partner, the Bauhaus student and architect Franz "Bobby" Aichinger to Palestine. In May of the same year she suffered a cardiac arrest while swimming in the waters of Tel Aviv. Obviously, Aichinger could bring her back to the shore; reanimations were in vain, though. Grosch was buried on the German Cemetary in Sarona near Tel Aviv.

In a letter to Max Werner Lenz, Grosch had characterized herself as it follows: "... this is the way I am, light-dark, warm-cold, up-down."

Literature: unpublished letters of Karla Grosch and Lily Klee, Stadtarchiv Zürich; two texts by Karla Grosch from her time at the Palucca school at the Palucca Archive at the ADK (Akademie der Künste, Berlin); Felix Klee, Paul Klee. Leben und Werk in Dokumenten, Erschienen in der Reihe "Atelier", Zürich 1960; Felix Klee (ed.), Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie 1893-1940, Köln 1979; Kunsthistorisches Seminar der Friedrich Schiller-Universität, Jena u.a. (ed.), Paul Klee in Jena 1924, Der Vortrag, In der Reihe "Minerva", Jenaer Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 10, Gera 1999

Boris Friedewald is an art historian.

Endless Bauhaus (9): Pier Vittorio

Anja Guttenberger — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:36:41 +0000

In their video column called Endless Bauhaus, Ilka and Andreas Ruby interview people of contemporary history on the Bauhaus’ current relevance. Is the Bauhaus something that has concluded its history or does it also have a contemporary presence?

The ninth issue features the architect Pier Vittorio.

Florence Henri. Avantgarde photographer

Anja Guttenberger — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:48:40 +0000

Florence Henri was born in New York on 28 November 1893; her father was French and her mother was German. Following her mother’s death in 1895, she and her father moved first to her mother’s family in Silesia; she later lived in Paris, Munich and Vienna and finally moved to the Isle of Wight in England in 1906. After her father’s death there three years later, Florence Henri lived in Rome with her aunt Anni and her husband, the Italian poet Gino Gori, who was in close touch with the Italian Futurists. She studied piano at the music conservatory in Rome.

During a visit to Berlin, Henri started to focus on painting, after meeting the art critic Carl Einstein and, through him, Herwarth Walden and other Berlin artists. In 1914, she enrolled at the Academy of Art in Berlin, and starting in 1922, trained in the studio of the painter Johannes Walter-Kurau. Before moving to Dessau, Henri studied painting with the Purists Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris. She arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in April 1927. She had already met the Bauhaus artists Georg Muche and László Moholy-Nagy and had developed a passion for Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture. Up to July 1927, Henri attended the preliminary course directed by Moholy-Nagy, lived in the Hungarian artist’s house, and became a close friend of his first wife, Lucia Moholy, who encouraged her to take up photography. From the Moholy-Nagys, Henri learned the basic technical and visual principles of the medium, which she used in her initial photographic experiments after leaving Dessau. In early 1928, she abandoned painting altogether and from then on focused on photography, with which she established herself as a professional freelance photographer with her own studio in Paris – despite being self-taught.

Even during her first productive year as a photographer, László Moholy-Nagy published one of her unusual self-portraits, as well as a still life with balls, tyres, and a mirror, in "i10. Internationale Revue".The first critical description of her photographic work, which Moholy-Nagy wrote to accompany the photos, recognizes that her pictures represented an important expansion of the entire ‘problem of manual painting’, in which ‘reflections and spatial relationships, overlapping and penetrations are examined from a new perspectival angle’.

Following this first public appearance as a photographer, Henri was invited in 1929 to present her work at the exhibitions ‘Present-Day Photography’ in the Folkwang Museum in Essen and ‘FiFo’ in Stuttgart, which are now recognized as being of historic importance; she presented 21 pictures, including her self-portrait with two reflected balls. The self-portrait shows her sitting in front of a long vertical mirror with two chrome balls. The arrangement of the mirror and balls create the appearance of a phallic symbol in which Henri’s face and body are reflected. In the strongly geometric, almost Cubist construction of the space, these elements might seem important merely for the design, but the idea that Henri is observing herself in a deliberately object-like way in a ‘male’ mirror is suggested too strongly for that. As if in an enclosed space, Henri examines her counterpart with a neutral air and uses the symbol to set herself on an equal footing with men.

Mirrors become the most important feature in Henri’s first photographs. She used them both for most of her self-dramatizations and also for portraits of friends, as well as for commercial shots. She took part in the international exhibition entitled ‘Das Lichtbild’ [The Photograph] in Munich in 1930, and the following year she presented her images of bobbins at a ‘Foreign Advertising Photography’ exhibition in New York. The artistic quality of her photographs was compared with Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy and Adolphe Baron de Mayer, as well as the with winner of the first prize at the exhibition, Herbert Bayer. Only three years after the new photographer had taken her first pictures, her self-portrait achieved the equal status with her male colleagues that she had been aiming for.

Up to the start of the Second World War, Henri established herself as a skilled photographer with her own photographic studio in Paris (starting in 1929). When the city was occupied by the Nazis, her photographic work declined noticeably. The photographic materials needed were difficult to obtain, and in any case Henri’s photographic style was forbidden under the Nazi occupation; she turned her attention again to painting. With only a few later exceptions, the peak of her unique photographic experiments and professional photographic work was in the period from 1927 to 1930.

Even in the 1950s, Henri’s photographs from the Thirties were being celebrated as icons of the avant-garde. Her photographic oeuvre was recognized during her lifetime in one-woman exhibitions and publications in various journals, includingN-Z Wochenschau.She also produced photographs during this period, such as a series of pictures of the dancer Rosella Hightower. She died in Compiègne on 24 July 1982.

Literature:

Diana Dupont, Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant-Garde, San Francisco 1990; Herbert Molderings, "Florence Henri. Der 'Esprit Nouveau' in der Fotografie", in: Herbert Molderings, Die Moderne der Fotografie, Hamburg 2008, S. 353-363; László Moholy-Nagy, "zu den fotografien von florence henri", i10 internationale revue, No. 17-18, 1928 (XII), S. 117; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Hg.), Die andere Seite des Mondes. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde, Köln 2011; Hôtel des Arts / Giovanni Battista Martini (Hg.), Florence Henri. Parcours dans la Modernité – Peinture / Photographie 1918 > 1979, Toulon 2010; letter by Florence Henri to Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, 11.2.1928, Paris, Nachlass Scheper, Berlin

She originally wanted to be an architect: Gertrud Arndt

Anja Guttenberger — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:29:41 +0000

Gertrud Arndt (maiden name Hantschk) was born on 20 September 1903 in Ratibor in Upper Silesia. Before enrolling at the Bauhaus in the winter semester of 1923–24, she took an apprenticeship at an architectural office in Erfurt. At her employer’s suggestion, she started using her camera to document buildings in Erfurt even during the apprenticeship. On seeing the first Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar in 1923, and with a student grant in her pocket, she decided to go to the Bauhaus to study architecture. It was only when she arrived there that she discovered that it did not yet have a department of architecture.

After completing the preliminary course, she moved to the weaving workshop, where she took part in various projects in a productive and creative way during the following three years (up to the winter semester of 1927) – such as a tapestry commissioned by Thost. In 1927, Arndt completed her studies at the Bauhaus with a final apprenticeship examination at the weavers’ guild in Glauchau. She never worked in textile design or weaving again afterwards; from then on, her focus was on photography, in which she had continued to develop her skills on a self-taught basis throughout her entire studies.

The same year, she married her fellow student Alfred Arndt, moving to Probstzella in Thuringia with him for work reasons. When he was appointed as head of the extension workshop at the Bauhaus in 1929 by its second Director, Hannes Meyer, the Arndts returned to Dessau. Gertrud Arndt did not enrol as a student again, however, seeing her task as being to provide her husband with support. In 1930, she produced a series of 43 self-portraits, which she called ‘Mask Portraits’. Her daughter Alexandra was born in 1931. The following year, the Arndts left the Bauhaus and returned to Probstzella again, where they remained until 1948. Their son Hugo was born in 1937. In 1948, they moved to Darmstadt, where Gertrud Arndt died on 10 July 2000.

Gertrud Arndt was rediscovered as a photographer during the 1980s, and has been compared with contemporary female photographers such as Marta Astfalck-Vietz and Claude Cahun. The Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design in Berlin is devoting a special exhibition to Gertrud Arndt in January 2013, linking her textile art and photography with each other for the first time.

The Mask Portraits

When Alfred and Gertrud Arndt returned to the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1929, Gertrud Arndt initially saw her role as the wife of a Bauhaus master as being ‘doing nothing’. She equipped the bathroom in their master’s house as a darkroom, and in 1930, out of ‘boredom’,started to take self-portraits, which she entitled ‘Mask Portraits’. Arndt described the way in which the photo series arose as follows: ‘… This was the way I sat down, on a chair without a back, of course. The camera was in front of a large window, we had gigantic windows in Dessau. And then I attached a black thread of twine to the old camera – it didn’t have a self-timer – which I ran through a round stone underneath, so that the camera couldn’t fall over. Tripods were still so wobbly then, they didn’t have a metal spike yet. I sat very carefully and looked into the camera. I placed a brush with a sheet of newspaper attached to it behind me so that I could adjust the focus; I gave the brush a push so that it fell over, and then I pulled the shutter. Quite simply, that was how they were all made, the Mask Photos.’

What she was interested in as an amateur photographer in these photos was experimenting with disguise. In contrast to earlier photographs and most of the photos produced at the Bauhaus around the same period, Arndt’s self-portraits are not experiments with extreme perspectives or detailed views. The Mask Photos always show Arndt in the same detail, to just below the chest. She changed the background using various materials; she combined her clothes with various tulle veils, hats, and other accessories. Her Mask Photos are not self-portraits that probe the photographer’s identity. They are early pioneering examples of the kind of self-dramatization also seen in the work of Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing – photographers today who use ever-new disguises to defamiliarize themselves to the extent that they are unrecognizable when they press the self-timer. They dramatize themselves as ‘others’: people who have hardly anything to do with the photographer. However, Arndt did not achieve her metamorphoses into various cliché-like female figures primarily through defamiliarizations using mask-like make-up or costumes. She used her ‘interest in the face, its variety of expressions and wealth of transformations’ to explore variations in facial expressiveness and its limitations. In each picture, reality was altered and questioned once again: ‘What is a face in reality? To what extent does an expression reveal a person’s inner nature? How important are make-up, the costume context and facial expression?’

Gertrud Arndt’s mask-like self-portraits reflect her affinity with various textile qualities, as well as her delight and enjoyment in experimenting with contemporary images of woman. She summed up the Mask Photos herself by saying, ‘You just need to open your eyes and already you are someone else, or you can open your mouth wide or something like that, and a different person has already appeared. And if you dress up in costume as well … It’s like looking into the mirror and pulling faces … Basically a mirror image.’

Literature: Alexa Bormann-Arndt, Interview mit Anja Schädlich, Berlin/Darmstadt 30. Nov. 2008; Das Verborgene Museum, Photographien der Bauhauskünstlerin Gertrud Arndt, Berlin 1994; Sabina Leßmann, „Zwischen Sachlichkeit und spielerischer Verwandlung“, in: Das Verborgene Museum, Photographien der Bauhauskünstlerin Gertrud Arndt, Berlin 1994; Graphische Sammlung des Hessischen Landesmuseums, Gertrud Arndt. Fotografien aus der Bauhauszeit (1926-1932), Darmstadt 1993

The sublime ship motif in the Kornhaus

Sophie Lucht — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:15:21 +0000

Ship symbolism was frequently used in 1920s architecture. It was regarded on the one hand as standing for the progressive technologizition of the working world and everyday life, and on the other – in architectural circles – as a symbol of a modern, mobile society’s fresh departure towards a new future. The idea is reflected in the maritime appearance of many buildings constructed in the "Neues Bauen" style. It could take the form of what were known as ‘gas pipelines’, which were used in balcony balustrades, garden fences, or staircases, calling up associations with ships’ railings. Round windows were also increasingly used. There were often also large rows of windows enclosed in narrow metal frames, with a horizontal orientation sometimes recalling cabin windows. However, it is not only in ship-like construction details, but also on a larger scale that many of the buildings designed by the representatives of architectural modernism have the appearance of massive ships’ hulls, sometimes crowned with impressive chimneystacks.

In comparison with the vivid examples of buildings dating from the 1920s that use the ship as a metaphor, the maritime quality of the Kornhaus, built in Dessau in 1930 by the architect Carl Fieger, only becomes clear to the viewer at second glance. The stretched length of the architectural body of the restaurant on the Elbe, and the originally light colour of its façade, initially suggest the shape of a ship only distantly. However, the two functioning chimneys on the roof strengthen the association with ships. The windows arranged on the street and river sides also resemble those of passengers’ cabins, and the south and east façades each have a small round window of the type usually seen in ships. However, the most obvious feature is the similarity of the semicircular glass veranda to the bridge of a ship.

Due to the slope falling away below it, the veranda – which was placed by Fieger not in a central position above the hull as in shipbuilding, but at the western end of the building – appears from the street side to be floating above the ground. It can be assumed that Carl Fieger was deliberately aiming for this effect, particularly as the veranda is given a stepped-back base for the purpose, which it extends well beyond. The direct vicinity of flowing water in the form of the adjoining branch of the Elbe, may have inspired the architect to develop this type of architectural solution. The Kornhaus was perceived from the swimming baths opposite or from the Elbe itself as ‘floating or swimming’. The impression that it is a ship apparently gliding past – one that moves relative to the passing pedestrians, swimmers, boaters in folding canoes, or boat passengers in exactly the same way – is inescapable from this angle and is evidence of the unusually successful integration of the building into immediate surroundings in which water is the predominant feature.

The direct vicinity of the river also makes the imitation of a maritime aesthetic appear much more plausible than in many other examples of buildings that use ship motifs that are not located near waterways. The natural locality also enabled Carl Fieger to engage directly with the leisure and recreation area aspects of the site. The architect paid particular attention to the needs of rowing-boat users, canoeists and boaters with folding canoes, as boat outings played an important role in leisure activities during the Weimar Republic. The pleasures of leisure activity had been made possible by sociopolitical reforms introduced in the Weimar Republic, such as the 40-hour working week and regular holidays. This created a division between regulated working hours and freely chosen private time, and industry responded to this with a wide range of products for leisure activities. Countless advertisements can be found from this period for sporting and leisure products and accessories, similar to camping supplies for people today. The inventiveness and practicality of much of the equipment – designed to enable people to cope with any adversity that might arise during an extended excursion into the natural world – is surprising. As Wolfgang Pehnt has described it, the ‘New Person’ was mobile, and the new form of architecture therefore also had respond to him or her in a flexible way. In the case of the Kornhaus, this meant deliberate inclusion of the ever more popular amateur water sports, as the branch of the Elbe adjoining the building was a popular route. The first preliminary sketch for the new Kornhaus building appears to be specially designed for this. The Elbe restaurant is viewed from above, with a noticeably horizontal orientation. The semicircular berth platform projecting into the Elbe would allow passing boaters to anchor in a radial formation and access the Elbe restaurant directly via a staircase.

In this broad, open design, the impression that it is a preliminary sketch is strengthened by the way in which there are apparently no restrictions on the shape of the building – to the advantage of the overall effect. By enclosing the veranda in glass in his preliminary sketch and projecting part of the building into the Elbe, Fieger showed that he was a child of his times, absorbing the developments and trends in leisure activities mentioned above.

In the final design, the impressive landing-place ultimately takes up much less space and no longer directly forms part of the overall complex. Access to the restaurant was by foot via a staircase once the boats had been moored to a jetty. These reductions became necessary as a result of financial cuts following the world economic crisis.

Literature:

Wolfgang Pehnt, Deutsche Architektur seit 1900, München 2005; Klaus Jan Philip, Das Reclam-Buch der Architektur, Stuttgart 2006; Erdgeschoss-Grundriss zum Kornhaus von Carl Fieger, in: Stadtarchiv Dessau-Roßlau, Mappe mit Architekturzeichnungen zum Kornhaus: B1 – 1414 bis 1496; Ulrich Kluge, Die Weimarer Republik, Paderborn 2006; Faltbootkatalog der Firma Berger von 1928; Otto Heinicke, Wasser-Führer für Faltboot- und Kanufahrer mit Heurichs-Streckkarte, Leipzig 1925; Helmut Erfurth, Das Kornhaus – ein Bauwerk der sachlichen Moderne, in: Dessauer Kalender 1990; Gert Kähler, Architektur als Symbolverfall – Das Dampfermotiv in der Baukunst, Braunschweig 1981

Author:

Sophie Lucht was born in 1974 and is a trained graphic designer. She started her studies in art history and cultural sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2006. At the moment, she writes her master thesis about Carl Fieger's Kornhaus mirrored in freetime activities of the Weimar Republic.

Otti Berger – Croatian Artist from the Bauhaus Textile Workshop

Antonija Mlikota — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Otti Berger was born in Zmajevac, today part of Croatia, but at the time of her birth called Vörösmart, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although she had Yugoslav citizenship because of the place of her birth, she is often included among Hungarian artists. Otti Berger spent the whole of her professional life living, being trained and working in Germany, and other European countries.She has remained relatively unknown to the discipline in Croatia.

After the Royal Academy for Art and Fine Crafts in Zagreb, she continued her education in 1927 at the Bauhaus school in Dessau. She attended the Vorkurs with László Moholy-Nagy and lectures by Klee and Kandinsky. After that she enrolled in the textile workshop of the Bauhaus in Dessau, and took her degree in 1930. After the departure of Gunta Stoelzl in 1931, Otti Berger ran the textile department of the Bauhaus. For a short time she was the deputy of Lilly Reich who took over the department in 1932.

After she left the Bauhaus and its closure, Otti Berger opened her own textile studio in Berlin. She worked with great success with numerous textile firms in Germany, Holland and Switzerland that produced textiles after her inventive design approaches, with the "o.b." or "Otti Berger" label. She was the only designer from Bauhaus who at that time sought and managed to get the protection of a patent for her textiles. She obtained one patent in Germany, another in England, while a third that was applied for in Germany was not granted.

Because of her Jewish descent she had to shut her firm, because in 1936 she was forbidden to work. Although most of the teachers from Bauhaus, including her fiancé Ludwig Hilberseimer managed to get a visa and leave for the US, Otti Berger did not manage it. She lived for a number of short periods in London, but could not manage to find steady employment. In 1938 she returned to Zmajevac and lived with her family. After that, she was clearly unable to leave Yugoslavia. In April 1944, with her family, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died.

The Evolution of Visual Training

Anja Guttenberger — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:07:40 +0000

Catherine Wetzel, Assistant Professor, IIT College of Architecture, presents the history of visual training at the Bauhaus, at IIT's College of Architecture under Peterhans and visual training at IIT now.

Bauhaus alliance 2019 founded

Anja Guttenberger — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:34:21 +0000

The minister for education of the federal state Saxony-Anhalt, Stephan Dogerloh, invited the past monday (5th November, 2012) his counterparts to a meeting in Dessau-Roslau in order to sign the "Bauhaus alliance 2019". This Memorandum of Understanding is set to support the festivities that will take place around the 100th anniversary of the existence of the Bauhaus. The federal states of Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Lower Saxony, and Baden-Württemberg aim to closely work together in preparing the Bauhaus jubilee in 2019 and to make the popular art school even more public in foreign countries.

In the course of this meeting the present directors of the three leading German Bauhaus institutions (Weimar Classics Foundation, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Bauhaus Archive Berlin / Museum of Design) signed a cooperation treaty.

Elsa Franke-Thiemann at the Bauhaus

Anja Guttenberger — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:40:51 +0000

Elsa Franke was born on 7 February 1910. Before starting her studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the spring of 1929, she had already attended the School of Arts and Crafts [Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule] in Berlin and the State Schools of Free and Applied Art [Staatschulen für Freie und Angewandte Kunst] (also in Berlin). At the Bauhaus, following the obligatory preliminary course under Josef Albers, she took part in the photography class run by the Berlin photographer Walter Peterhans, which was affiliated to the Printing and Advertising Workshop. She also received training in the free painting courses given by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

In response to an advertisement by the Director, Hannes Meyer (in 1929), Franke designed several wallpaper patterns for the new “bauhaus collection” to be produced by the wallpaper company Gebrüder Rasch. Her designs were fundamentally different from the Bauhaus wallpapers that later went into production, which all had bright, friendly tones with tiny line and dot patterns. By contrast, Franke's designs were collaged dark photograms produced using plants, thread, and blobs of paint: large-format, heavy ornamentation of the type the Bauhaus wanted to get away from. Franke's other photographic work mainly consists of reciprocal portrait shots of herself and her partner and later husband (from 1947), Hans Thiemann, whom she met at the Bauhaus as well as portraits of the artist group "Fantasten" and their works. Furthermore remain photos of her milieu in the Berlin district Neukoelln in the same style at the "Museum Neukölln". The Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin owns prints from all parts of Elsa Franke-Thiemann's photographic work since 2004 and honored the artist with an exhibition that same year. Two of her wallpaper designs are now produced as gift wrap paper at the bauhaus shop of the Bauhaus Archive.

Elsa Franke completed her studies as a trained photographer and graphic designer in July 1931, receiving Bauhaus Diploma no. 59. She continued to focus on photography after her graduation. She initially worked as a press photographer in Berlin, and later as a photographer of puzzle-pictures for journals. When photographic work became impossible for her for political reasons, she took a post as an editorial assistant with the Berlin publishers Hoffmann and Campe. Her partner and later husband, Hans Thiemann, was unable to exhibit his Surrealist painting at the time, for fear of being denounced as ‘degenerate’. Her earnings had to support the two of them.

In 1960, Hans Thiemann was appointed as Professor at the Academy of Art in Hamburg, and Elsa Franke-Thiemann laid her photographic work aside when they moved there. The former Bauhaus student died in Hamburg on 15 November 1981. Thirty years after her death, in 2011, the majority of her surviving photographic works passed to the archive of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Literature: Bauhaus-diploma of Elsa Franke, No. 59, 6th July 1931, signed by Mies van der Rohe and Joost Schmidt (on 14th July 1931), Document, Bauhaus Archive Berlin; Annemarie Jaeggi & Margot Schmidt (eds.), Elsa Thiemann: Fotografin. Bauhaus und Berlin, Berlin 2004; Lutz Schöbe, „eine reflex-korelle für dessau“, bauhaus: Die Zeitschrift der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, No. 2, 2011; Tapetenfabrik Gebr. Rasch & Co. und Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (Hg.), Burckhard Kieselbach, Werner Möller, Sabine Thümmler (Red.), Reklame & Erfolg einer Marke, Köln 1995; Use Eskildsen (ed.), Fotografieren hieß Teilnehmen: Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik, Folkwang Museum Essen, Essen 1994; Information by Margot Schmidt, administrator to the Estate of Elsa Franke-Thiemann