Bauhaus Women

Bauhaus Women
Author: Elizabeth Otto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 191221797X

Forty-five key women of the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective reclaims the other half of Bauhaus history, yielding a new understanding of the radical experiments in art and life undertaken at the Bauhaus and the innovations that continue to resonate with viewers around the world today. The story of the Bauhaus has usually been kept narrow, localised to its original time and place and associated with only a few famous men such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective bursts the bounds of this slim history by revealing fresh Bauhaus faces: Forty-five Bauhaus women unjustifiably forgotten by most history books. This book also widens the lens to reveal how the Bauhaus drew women from many parts of Europe and beyond, and how, through these cosmopolitan female designers, artists and architects, it sent the Bauhaus message out into the world and to a global audience.

Bauhaus Women

Bauhaus Women
Author: Ulrike Muller
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-11-17
Genre: Design
ISBN: 2080301209

This monograph—published to coincide with the Bauhaus exhibition at the MoMA (November 8, 2009-January 25, 2010)—celebrates the work of twenty women artists who created feverishly in all the teaching, workshop, and production branches of the Bauhaus—women who should have been included in the major art histories of the twentieth century long ago, but whose names, masterpieces, and extraordinary lives have only gradually become known to us. Recognized figures such as Anni Albers—the first textile artist to be exhibited at the MoMA—and Marianne Brandt—whose elegant geometric tableware have become classic Alessi designs—are showcased alongside previously unknown artists such as Gertrud Grunow, who taught "Harmonizing Science"; Helene Börner, who led the textile workshop; and Ilse Fehling, a sculptor and the most sought-after set and costume designer of her generation. Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus and most of its students were poor and lacking in just about everything. What it did have, however, was an abundance of enthusiasm, talent, and innovative creativity. Furthermore, over half of those seeking to enroll at the school were women. This tornado of the "fairer sex" was initially seen as a threat, and the weaving mill was quickly turned into a separate "women’s facility." Nevertheless, over the years the mill became a hotbed of groundbreaking production, whose impact far surpassed national borders, as demonstrated by the international acclaim of photographers Lucia Moholy, Florence Henri, and Grete Stern.

Haunted Bauhaus

Haunted Bauhaus
Author: Elizabeth Otto
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262043297

An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

Bauhaus Bodies

Bauhaus Bodies
Author: Elizabeth Otto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501344773

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.

The Gendered World of the Bauhaus

The Gendered World of the Bauhaus
Author: Anja Baumhoff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Enth. u.a.: S. 150-155: The female circle versus the male square: order and art in the thinking of Johannes Itten. - S. 155-163: The role of sexuality in the thinking of Paul Klee: "Genius is switching on energy, sperm."

Bauhaus Weaving Theory

Bauhaus Weaving Theory
Author: T’ai Smith
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-11-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1452943222

The Bauhaus school in Germany has long been understood through the writings of its founding director, Walter Gropius, and well-known artists who taught there such as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts by women in the school’s weaving workshop. In Bauhaus Weaving Theory, T’ai Smith uncovers new significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers. From colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of soundproofing and light-reflective fabric, the workshop’s innovative creations influenced a modernist theory of weaving. In the first careful examination of the writings of Bauhaus weavers, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stözl, and Otti Berger, Smith details how these women challenged assumptions about the feminine nature of their craft. As they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines like painting, architecture, and photography, Smith argues, the weavers resisted modernist thinking about distinct media. In parsing texts about tapestries and functional textiles, the vital role these women played in debates about medium in the twentieth century and a nuanced history of the Bauhaus comes to light. Bauhaus Weaving Theory deftly reframes the Bauhaus weaving workshop as central to theoretical inquiry at the school. Putting questions of how value and legitimacy are established in the art world into dialogue with the limits of modernism, Smith confronts the belief that the crafts are manual and technical but never intellectual arts.

Design in Motion

Design in Motion
Author: Laura A. Frahm
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262045184

The first comprehensive history in English of film at the Bauhaus, exploring practices that experimented with film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium.” With Design in Motion, Laura Frahm proposes an alternate history of the Bauhaus—one in which visual media, and film in particular, are crucial to the Bauhaus’s visionary pursuit of integrating art and technology. In the first comprehensive examination in English of film at the Bauhaus, Frahm shows that experimentation with film spanned a range of Bauhaus practices, from textiles and typography to stage and exhibition design. Indeed, Bauhausler deployed film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium,” malleable in shape and form, unfolding and refracting into multiple material, aesthetic, and philosophical directions. Frahm shows how the encounter with film imbued the Bauhaus of the 1920s and early 1930s with a flexible notion of design, infusing painting with temporal concepts, sculptures with moving forms, photographs with sequential aesthetics, architectural designs with a choreography of movement. Frahm considers, among other things, student works that explored light and the transparent features of celluloid and cellophane; weaving practices that incorporate cellophane; experimental films, social documentaries, and critical reportage by Bauhaus women; and the proliferation of film strips in posters, book covers, and other typographic work. Viewing the Bauhaus’s engagement with film through a media-theoretic lens, Frahm shows how film became a medium for “design in motion.” Movement and process, rather than stability and fixity, become the defining characteristics of Bauhaus educational, aesthetic, and philosophical ethos.

Bauhaus Futures

Bauhaus Futures
Author: Laura Forlano
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262042916

Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology. Contributors Alice Arnold, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Marshall Brown, Stuart Candy, Jessica Charlesworth, Elizabeth J. Chin, Taeyoon Choi, B. Coleman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael J. Golec, Kate Hennessy, Matthew Hockenberry, Joi Ito, Denisa Kera, N. Adriana Knouf, Silvia Lindtner, Shannon Mattern, Ramia Mazé, V. Mitch McEwen, Oliver Neumann, Paul Pangaro, Tim Parsons, Nassim Parvin, Joanne Pouzenc, Luiza Prado de O. Martin, Daniela K. Rosner, Natalie Saltiel, Trudi Lynn Smith, Carol Strohecker, Alex Taylor, Martin Thaler, Fred Turner, Andre Uhl, Jeff Watson, Robert Wiesenberger

4 "Bauhausmädels"

4
Author: Kai Uwe Schierz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019
Genre: Art
ISBN:

4 Bauhausmadels Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Heymann, Margaretha Reichardt Edited by Angermuseum Erfurt; Kai Uwe Schierz; Patrick Rossler; Miriam Krautwurst; Elizabeth Otto March 2019 978-3-95498-459-6 u 38 Hardback u 336pp u 275 x 220mm u 496 pictures In 1919, the program of the State Bauhaus promised a modern education for the talented, regardless of age and gender, which drew many young women to apply. The Bauhaus-Girl Type, described in a January 1930 issue of the magazine The Week, knew what she wanted and would succeed. This volume's essays question the euphoria of the time period with the knowledge of Bauhaus members' subsequent destinies. These essays take as exemplary the biographies of Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Heymann, and Margaretha Reichardt, both during their training and as Bauhaus graduates.

Bauhaus Textiles

Bauhaus Textiles
Author: Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Total Pages: 208
Release: 1998
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780500280348

When talented female students arrived to study at the Bauhaus, they soon discovered that the founder of the school, Walter Gropius, was not strictly adhering to his original declaration of equality between men and women. In the hierarchy of art and design, it was textiles that were deemed to be 'women's work'. Nevertheless, the new weavers responded to the challenge with remarkable virtuosity, pouring all their artistic energy and talent into this new field of interest. Eagerly embracing advanced technology, they incorporated new or unusual materials (such as Cellophane, leather and early synthetics), creating reversible fabrics which had acoustic and light-reflecting properties. They produced multi-layered cloths, some with double and triple weaves, and later mode extensive use of the jacquard loom. The result was a rebirth of hand-weaving and a new professionalism in designing textiles for mass production. In this model study, superbly illustrated with rare or little seen photographs of the works themselves, Sigrid Wortmann Weltge recreates the atmosphere of creative excitement at the Bauhaus. Original archival research and interviews with survivors and their students, as well as with leading contemporary designers, detail the workshop's history and its enduring legacy : marvellous fabrics still being produced today. Bauhaus Textiles unearths the missing chapter in the story of the most important institution in the history of modern design.