Women Of The Bauhaus Finally Get Their Due: A New Book and NYC Museum Show

Image by dalbera via Flickr

If you have any interest in art or design, you’ve probably heard of the Bauhaus, the art, craft and design school that opened in Weimar, Germany in 1919 and operated for only 14 years. Its male stars — including painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and designers Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, appointed the school’s director in 1930 — are familiar names. Now its women students are finally getting some attention, thanks to a new book about them, and included in a new show at MOMA, on view until January 2010.

A gorgeous book of textile designs makes clear what skill the women brought to their work. From the Amazon.com review:

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