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The women of Bauhaus: When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them?

Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius’s legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today.

At least they do in the photographs in Bauhaus Women, a book by Ulrike Muller, a “museum educator” in Weimar, the German town where the Bauhaus opened in 1919, declaring equality between the sexes. Where German women had once received art education at home with tutors, at the Bauhaus they were free to join courses.

And yet the photographs of those seemingly liberated women tell, at best, a half truth. Yes, the world’s most famous modern art school accepted women. But few became well known. While the men of the Bauhaus – Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – are celebrated, names like Gunta Stölzl (a weaver), Benita Otte (another weaver), Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain (ceramicist), Ilse Fehling (sculptor and set designer) or Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (toy maker) mean precious little.

If these bright young things came to the Bauhaus as equals, why are the women so obscure? The school’s fleeting existence (just 14 years), the rise of the anti-modern National Socialist movement and six years of world war may have been factors, but the uncomfortable truth is that the Bauhaus was never a haven of female emancipation.

More women than men applied to the school in 1919, and Gropius insisted that there would be “no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex” – those very words betraying his real views. Those of the “strong sex” were, in fact, marked out for painting, carving and, from 1927, the school’s new architecture department. The “beautiful sex” had to be content, mostly, with weaving.

The school’s students produced radical work, but Gropius’s vision was, at heart, medieval, if apparently modern, and he was keen to keep women in their place – at looms, primarily, weaving modern fabrics for fashion houses and industrial production. He believed women thought in “two dimensions”, while men could grapple with three.

By the time Mies van der Rohe was appointed director in 1930, the Bauhaus had essentially become an architecture school and, increasingly, there was little place for women to shine. Those who did, like Anni Albers, did so only after they abandoned the Bauhaus. Albers left Germany for the US in 1933, with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, to teach at the new Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and make fabrics for design-led companies like Knoll and Rosenthal.

Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, the ceramicist, also became a big success in the US with her Pond Hall pottery. Benita Otte was ousted from her position as head of the weaving department but established her own mill elsewhere in Germany; her fabrics remain in production. Mean­ while, Gunta Stölzl, hounded by Nazi sympathisers within the Bauhaus after her marriage to a Jew, left in 1931 and founded her own successful handweaving business in Switzerland.

Many other Bauhaus women simply vanished without trace. Sadly, this was all too true of the toy maker Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, who was killed in a bombing raid in 1944, and of Otti Berger who, on a trip to see her mother in Yugoslavia in 1939, was unable to get a visa to the US despite an offer of work at Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 2005, newly available Soviet archives revealed that Berger, a Jew, had died at Auschwitz in 1944.

Marianne Brandt, a metalworker, was one of the few who made a name for herself while at the Bauhaus. The globe lamps she designed in 1926, and the Kandem bedside light, with adjustable reflector, have long been standard-bearers of Bauhaus design.

But if the school’s women are largely unsung, their legacy lives on. As Bauhaus architecture becomes a distant vision of the future, so Bauhaus fabrics remain as useful, tactile and special as they were when these women set out to equal their male peers. As Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983) put it, “We wanted to create living things with contemporary relevance, suitable for a new style of life. Huge potential for experimentation lay before us. It was essential to define our imaginary world, to shape our experiences through material, rhythm, proportion, colour and form.” Against the odds, they did.

how did i not know about this?