Bauhaus textiles: Women artists and the weaving workshop - Softcover

Weltge-Wortmann, Sigrid

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0500236585 ISBN 13: 9780500236581

Publisher: Thames and Hudson, 1993

Synopsis

The place of the Bauhaus in the history of 20th-century design is unchallengeable. Yet the Weaving Workshop, the longest standing and most successful of all Bauhaus workshops, has been neglected. Why? For one simple reason - its artists were almost all female. When these brilliantly talented women arrived at the school, they soon found that Gropius could not sustain his ringing declaration of equality "between the beautiful and the strong gender". Textiles were to be "women's work". The consequences - both in the early days of artistic expression in Weimar and in later developments for industry - could hardly have been foreseen. The Bauhaus weavers produced fabrics which incorporated new or unusual materials, which had acoustic and light-reflecting properties, and which were reversible. They produced multi-layered fabrics, cloths with double and triple weaves, and later made extensive use of the Jacquard loom. In this study, illustrated with rare or little seen illustrations of the works themselves, Sigrid Wortmann Weltge recreates the heady atmosphere of creative excitement at the Bauhaus. Original archival research, and interviews both with survivors and their students and leading contemporary designers, detail the workshop's history and its enduring legacy. When the Nazis closed the institution in 1933, its members dispersed to Switzerland, Holland, England, France, Russia, Mexico and many centres in the United States. This book unearths the missing chapter in the story of the most important institution in the history of modern design, and resurrects the work of gifted craftswomen, for too long denied their due as pioneers in their field.

About this title

Review:

Admissions literature for the Bauhaus school of art in the 1920s and early 1930s described an egalitarian community, with "absolute equality but also absolute equal duties." Women artists arriving at the Bauhaus were nevertheless immediately shuttled off to the weaving workshop, regardless of their interest in textiles. As Sigrid Wortmann Weltge explains, this was only the first indication that all was not progressive in this school of modernism. "They were at the Bauhaus because it had promised equality in the choice of a profession. In reality they found that their role within the institution was defined and formulated by their teachers. Only then did it become apparent that they were assigned talents and capacities viewed as innately female, of which a special predilection for textiles was only one."

Those who chose to stick it out in this sexist environment went on to create textiles which were some of the most beautiful and underappreciated art of the era. The weaving workshop eventually became a "laboratory for industrial fabrics" and one of the most financially successful workshops in the Bauhaus. This book chronicles the creative growth of the workshop within the larger context of the Bauhaus, and it unearths the history of individual artists such as Gunta Stolzl, Anni Albers, Benita Otte, Otti Berger, and Marli Ehrman. The author interviewed surviving Bauhaus weavers and their students, and she collected photographs--many of them rare--to illustrate nearly every page of this handsome work. --Maria Dolan

About the Author:

Sigrid Wortmann Weltge is Professor of Art and Design History at the Philadelphia University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0500236585
• ISBN 13: 9780500236581
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208