Ahrenshoop – Women

Dörte Helm was a striking artistic personality in Ahrenshoop in the 1920s. As the daughter of a university professor, the classical philologist Rudolf Helm, who was called from Berlin to Rostock in 1909, and his wife Alice, who came from the Jewish Bauer-Rothschild family, she was comprehensively educated in the humanities. At the art academy in Kassel, which admitted women to regular education at an early stage, she studied sculpture from 1915 and went to Weimar in 1918 to study graphics. When the Bauhaus was founded in April 1919, Dörte Helm was one of the first female students at this avant-garde art school. Teachers such as Johannes Itten and Georg Muche, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and last but not least the Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, gave her a concentrated essence of the leading ideas of the time. She underwent a broad craft-theoretical education in the applied and free fields. Gropius held Dörte Helm in such high esteem that he enlisted her to work on his own projects while she was still a student. In 1924, she received a position as a journeywoman at the Bauhaus. This success, which was unusual for a young artist, provoked conflicts, so that Dörte Helm left the Bauhaus in 1924 and returned to Rostock. She joined the "Rostock Artists' Association" and became involved in the exhibition management there. This also opened the door to Rostock society for her. The publisher and patron Peter Erichson invited her to his Ahrenshooper house, the old studio house of Friedrich Wachenhusen at Schifferberg 10. She designed furniture and a large stained glass window for Erichson. During this period, her pictorial work continued to develop in a direction that other Bauhaus painters also went through - towards a closed figurativeness that was once again pictorial. Dörte Helm preferred the pastel technique, probably because of the increased colour vibrancy. In addition to landscapes, portraits and self-portraits, she also produced some still lifes and surreal scenes. The principles of colour composition internalised at the Bauhaus are conveyed in each of these works and make them resonate.