10 Bauhaus Women Who Reshaped Contemporary Design

The men of the Bauhaus school, such as Josef Albers , László Moholy-Nagy , and Paul Klee , became some of the most celebrated pioneers of modern art. But the women artists who taught, studied, and did groundbreaking work within the school are often remembered in the books of history as wives of their male colleagues – or worse, they are not even mentioned at all . Although women were allowed to study at the German school, a strong gender bias still influenced its structure. Female students, for example, were encouraged to pursue weaving rather than male-dominated fields such as painting, sculpture and architecture. In 2019, the Bauhaus turned 100. Since then, designers, photographers and architects such as Anni Albers , Marianne Brandt and Gertrud Arndt have been increasingly recognized for their essential role in laying the foundations for centuries of innovation in art and design that have come to would follow . Below, we highlight 10 Bauhaus women who contributed to the school’s innovation throughout its brief existence from 1919 to 1933 and built its lasting legacy. Check it out!

1. Anni Albers

Anni Albers arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, hoping to continue the painting studies she had begun at the Hamburg School of Arts and Crafts. By 1923, however, she was spending most of her time in the school's weaving workshop, where she quickly became a master of the loom . Influenced by Paul Klee, Albers used weaving to develop a visual language composed of rigid contour patterns . Her early tapestries would have a considerable impact on the development of geometric abstraction in the visual arts. In 1930, she designed a cotton and cellophane curtain that simultaneously absorbs sound and reflects light. In 1931, she was appointed to head the weaving workshop and became one of the first women at the Bauhaus to take on a leadership role. .

2. Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt 's early work so impressed László Moholy-Nagy that in 1924 he opened a space for her in the metalworking trade, a discipline from which women had previously been barred . She went on to design some of the most iconic works associated with the Bauhaus , such as an ashtray resembling a metal ball cut in half, which is housed in the MoMA collection, and a silver tea infuser and strainer – her first student project. which is now owned by the MET and the British Museum. During her years at the Bauhaus, Brandt became one of Germany's most famous industrial designers . And after Moholy-Nagy stepped down as head of the metal workshop in 1928, it was Brandt who replaced him, beating out her male colleagues for the job. . In the same year, she developed one of the most commercially successful objects to come out of the school : the Kandem bedside lamp.

3. Gertrud Arndt

Arndt's desire was to become an architect, but it was only after she landed at the Bauhaus in 1923 that she realized that architecture classes were not yet available at the school. She eventually created geometrically patterned rugs in her weaving workshop. One of these fabrics graced the floor of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’s office. But despite Arndt’s success on the loom, it was her photography practice that would become most influential to artists. modern and contemporary . As a self-taught photographer, Arndt began by photographing the buildings and cityscapes around her. It was Arndt’s series of imaginative self-portraits titled “ Mask Portraits ,” however, that ultimately shaped her legacy. The series—which features Arndt performing a series of traditional female roles and wearing a profusion of veils, lace and hats - is now seen as an important precursor to artists such as Cindy Sherman.

4. Gunta Stölzl

Gunta Stölzl was an early member of the Bauhaus , arriving at the school in 1919 at the age of 22. While experimenting with a wide range of disciplines at the Bauhaus, Stölzl concentrated on weaving, a department she headed from 1926 to 1931. There, she remained known for complex patchworks composed of undulating lines that merge into kaleidoscopic mosaics.

“We wanted to create living things with contemporary relevance , suitable for a new way of life,” she once said. “It was essential to define our imaginary world, to give shape to our experiences through material, rhythm, proportion, color and form.”

5. Benita Koch-Otte

Benita Koch-Otte had already taught drawing and crafts at a girls' secondary school for five years before joining the Bauhaus, shifting her focus to her own studies. There, with fellow weaver and painter Stölzl, she used textiles to explore new approaches of abstraction . To further develop their skills, the two also took classes at the nearby Dyeing Technical School and the Textile Technical School. Koch-Otte married the director of the Bauhaus photography department, Heinrich Koch, in 1929. Together they moved to Prague when the Nazi regime came to power. After her husband's unexpected death, however, Koch-Otte returned to Germany. There she became the director of a textile factory and continued to teach until the end of her life - and her textiles are still in production .

6. Otti Berger

Berger was one of the most creative members of the weaving workshop, with a more expressive and conceptual approach than many of her contemporaries . After Stölzl relinquished his position as head of the department in 1931, Berger took over and established her own curriculum, but remained there only until 1932, when he began his individual work. Berger opened her own studio in Berlin and began the process of applying for a visa, with the goal of moving to the United States. There, she planned to enroll in Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus school in Chicago and escape Hitler's regime, but her The application was halted. While waiting for approval, she returned to Croatia, where she was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz. She died there in 1944, but her textiles survive in collections from the MET to the Art Institute of Chicago .

7. Ilse Fehling

Ilse Fehling had a natural talent for creating sculptural forms and theater designs , skills she further honed while at the Bauhaus. Her theatrical props and sets married whimsy and function, and in 1922 she patented a round, rotating stage for wooden puppets. . After leaving the Bauhaus, she moved to Berlin and established a multifaceted freelance practice, dividing her time between creating costumes and stage designs and sculptures . After studying in Rome in the early 1930s, Fehling returned to Germany, where her sculptures – forged in metal and stone and fusing cubism and corporeality – were considered “degenerate.” She moved on, continuing to develop her diverse oeuvre throughout her long life.

8. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher was one of the few women at the Bauhaus to move from the weaving workshop to the male-dominated woodcarving department . There, she invented a number of successful toy and furniture designs, including her "construction game" of small ships", which remains in production to this day. The game manifested central Bauhaus principles: its 22 blocks, forged in primary colors, can be built into the shape of a boat, but can also be rearranged to allow for creative experimentation. She was also known for the scrapbooking kits and coloring books she designed for the publisher Verlag Otto Maier Ravensburg. But her most pioneering work proved to be the interior she designed for a children's room in the "Haus am Horn" , a house that exemplified the aesthetics of movement. She designed each piece to grow with the child : a puppet theater could be transformed into a bookshelf, a changing table into a desk, and so on.

9. Margarete Heymann

At just 21, Heymann refused to follow most of her peers into the Bauhaus weaving workshop, convincing Gropius to open a place for her in ceramics. There, the free-thinking young artist began creating angular objects composed of triangles and circles and decorated with constructivist patterns and colored enamels . Heymann and her husband established a workshop, Haël-Werkstätten, where they produced their designs. They were an early success , selling in upscale stores in Europe, Britain and the United States, but the couple were forced to sell the company in 1934. With the emergence of political conflict, Heymann, who was Jewish, fled to England to escape persecution. There she opened a new company, Greta Pottery , and would later devote her days to painting.

10. Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp

Like many of her Bauhaus contemporaries, Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp was a passionate colorist , an interest she encouraged in the school's mural painting workshop. Her work took her to Moscow with her husband, Hinnerk Scheper, where the couple established a "Center for Coloring and Painting in the City of Moscow". Consultant for Color in Architecture and Urban Landscape” and developed color schemes for exteriors and interiors of buildings in the Russian capital. After the Bauhaus closed in 1933, Scheper-Berkenkamp worked as a freelance painter in Berlin and published a series of whimsical children’s books, coming-of-age narratives told through the lens of fantastical adventures. They were some of the first to combine surrealist drawings with bizarre plots. ; two of the books were recently re-released by the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.