Designing Modern Womanhood

The experimental art school known as the Bauhaus opened in 1919 during a period marked by new ideas and profound change. The First World War saw unprecedented levels of violence and destruction. 

As is often a side-effect of conflict, it also ushered in technological advances—some specific to war, like poison gas, tanks, aircraft carriers, and others with applications in civilian life, including blood banks, stainless steel, and the zipper. 

The collapse of Germany’s monarchy and the advent of its first democracy empowered wide swaths of the citizenry, perhaps most of all women who, for the first time, received rights to vote and to stand for political office. 

The Bauhaus’s women have rarely been the focus of discussion, as the school is usually remembered for a small handful of male artists, architects, and designers. Yet thirty-seven percent of the members of this over 1,250-person movement were women. In fact, during the Bauhaus’s first semester, it exceeded parity, with female students outnumbering male, eighty-four to seventy-nine. 

Fearing that an art and design school dominated by women would not be taken seriously, Walter Gropius instituted a secret policy of higher admissions standards for female applicants, in order to reduce their numbers over time to no more than one-third of the student body. 

Despite such discriminatory practices—or perhaps even because of them; the admitted women had to be as good as or better than the men—the Bauhaus fostered a generation of extraordinary female artists, who innovated designs to meet the challenges of their dynamic times.

Some of these women took on leadership roles within the school. When it closed, a number of them would bring the Bauhaus skill set into unexpected places.

Marianne Brandt is a stand out for her design innovation. During her first semester in the metal workshop, fall 1924, she designed a tiny silver tea-infuser that currently holds the record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Bauhaus object—easily justifiable through its quintessentially Bauhaus use of pure forms and stark materials. 

Brandt was also a typical Bauhaus designer in that she could work in multiple media; already trained as a painter and sculptor before she came to the school, once there Brandt embraced the modern and technologically based media of photography and photomontage.

As the only woman to receive her degree from the Bauhaus metal workshop, Brandt was certainly an exception. Much more commonly, Bauhaus women are associated with the weaving workshop, since so many of them were encouraged and even pressured to specialize there.

It was even dubbed “the women’s class” for a short period of time starting in 1920. But the weaving workshop also became legendary for the camaraderie among its members and for the innovations in fabric designs which brought Bauhaus to the mass market and helped to support the school financially.

There was, however, significant ground between the single exception of Brandt in the metal workshop and the heavily female dominated weaving workshop. Over the fourteen-year span of the Bauhaus’s existence, women participated in every workshop and program at the school, including architecture. Other female members innovated designs in diverse areas including furniture and toy design and modern ceramics for everyday use. 

Photographer Lucia Moholy was never officially on the school’s staff, yet she collaborated with her husband, Bauhaus master Moholy-Nagy, on many of his theoretical writings; she was also essential for documenting Bauhaus buildings and products in her own photographic work. 

With the rise of Nazism, many Bauhäusler, including Stern, left Germany to return to their homelands or to escape into exile. They brought their pedagogical innovations to the US (Albers, Gropius) and farther afield, including Japan (Michiko Yamawaki), and much of Europe. 

Perhaps the most poignant example of this is Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who taught Bauhaus methods as a kind of proto art therapy to five-hundred children interned in Theresienstadt Ghetto and Concentration Camp.

This collage was made by Helena Mändlová in the Terezín concentration camp under the tutelage of Dicker-Brandeis

Creating art and design during those tumultuous decades, Bauhaus women shaped their products and their identities to create new ideals of the modern female designer.