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"Women at the Bauhaus"
Hamburg, September 2001: Roughly 80 years after having been founded in Weimar, the "Bauhaus" (1919 - 1925 in Weimar and 1925 - 1933 in Dessau) continues to generate a great deal of interest and has meanwhile become a concept known worldwide. The primary reason for this is the exceptionally high quality of the designs drafted there, these days often summarized under the name "Bauhaus Style". That the Bauhaus was a focal point for such artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Lyonel Feininger, painters who were among the avant garde of their time, or that such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (director of the Bauhaus Dessau from 1930 - 1933) were active there continues to reinforce the institute's fame right up to the present day, even though the facility in Dessau was disbanded at the start of the 1933 summer semester due to political reasons.
The early 1920s, the founding years of the Bauhaus, were also an era of progressive women seeking equality and the freedom to express themselves. They started choosing professions on their own, shaking the stays out of a corseted social outfit: under a stylish bob or a pageboy cut, the most extravagant of them sported
cigarillos between carmine-red lips, or even got behind the wheel of a car. In 1919, the "Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar" was the first modern school of art at which women were able to matriculate on an equal basis. At 50%, their share of the student body was unusually high. The first women attending the Bauhaus were allowed unrestricted access to the various studio workshops (printing, foundry, carpentry, sculpture, glass-painting, pottery etc.). Albeit, their efforts soon turned to founding a class comprised purely of women, as "the crafts were physically too strenuous and spiritually of meager correspondence to female dispositions". What soon evolved out of this class for women was a professional, efficiently functioning weavers' workshop, one in which a keen yet fertile competitive atmosphere reigned. As the students were more than willing to work and experiment freely on their own, the teachers didn't always have an easy time of it. An everpresent factor was the conflict between free-scale work and exploitable drafts for the textile industry, drafts which generated the funds to run the weaving studio. Having taken over direction in 1927, by 1931 Gunta Stölzl had already distanced herself from earlier Bauhaus textiles as "idea-laden flights of fancy" and demanded drafts suited to industrial production.
Wall-to-wall carpeting from the Bauhaus? The time just wasn't ripe enough for something like that back then. In contrast to Bauhaus wallpaper - which even at that time was already being widely sold as a result of mechanical pattern printing - the series production of carpeting was still in its infancy in the 1920s. As a rule the women weavers worked on one-of-a-kind carpets. More the exception were carpeting décor elements capable of being strung together to form unlimited lengths and widths. The "repeat", the endless ability for repetition within the pattern, was obligatory only for drapes and upholstery materials.
A good seventy years after the historic Bauhaus phase, this factor was cause enough for the Vorwerk Teppichwerke in Hamlin, Germany to explore whether the original draft designs from the "Bauhaus women weavers" were suitable for the precisest possible conversion onto wall-to-wall carpeting using today's methods of production. In selecting draft designs, strict attention was paid that only those drafts came into question which displayed a clearly endless repeat pattern, yet had never left the design stage. All drafts intended as "all-round" compositions, suited as carpets, curtains or blankets, were consistently eliminated.
The Vorwerk Teppichwerke were able to present the end result of this ambitious project in 1994 in Dessau - right on schedule for the 75th anniversary of the Bauhaus itself: The collection "Classic: Frauen am Bauhaus" ('Women at the Bauhaus') is comprised of a total of eleven draft designs from the Bauhaus weavers Gunta Stölzl, Grete Reichardt, Gertrud Arndt, Kitty Fischer and Monica Bella-Broner. The drafts are primarily made up of geometric patterns in which square, rectangular or round compositions in harmonic colour schemes dominate. The impact they attain is constructive and functional, one that aspires toward regularity, order and a clear division of space.
That the Vorwerk Teppichwerke can regard this collection with a particular amount of pride is not least of all thanks to some of the women themselves. Gertrud Arndt and Monica Bella-Broner took time in 1993 to personally collaborate on the new edition of their designs. Monica Bella-Broner herself reviewed her design drafts; Gertrud Arndt was able to accompany the colour-matching phases and the production at Vorwerk. Together with the Vorwerk Design Team, a great deal of work was performed perfecting the collection, right down to the finest of details.
Bringing about this collection necessitated a long preparatory phase. It's really a shame that the "Bauhausers" and the former Barmer Teppichfabrik Vorwerk&Co. didn't get together back then in the 20s: As was the case with the Bauhaus representatives, at Vorwerk&Co. efforts were also being made to surmount the design principles of yore, in other words to copy Oriental and European styling, and develop abstract carpeting patterns that could stand on their own. The Vorwerk Teppichwerke had already invested three years of intensive research before the collection "Classic: Frauen am Bauhaus" was produced for the first time in 1994. Hundreds of sketches and drafts were viewed at a variety of archives and studio workshops. This kind of cost and time-intensive research was only able to be accomplished by working jointly with internal and external experts. Experience with Bauhaus textiles was required in order to be capable of making a preliminary selection that would be adaptable for today's series production.
The Bauhaus ideals are once again very "in", on the one hand because design principles such as functionality and simplicity are nothing less than timeless. Perhaps the yearning for a clearly ordered home has become greater again today as a result of technical developments progressing at such a rapid pace. On the other hand, committed staff at the Bauhaus Dessau knowledgeable in matters of design are concerning themselves with the question: "Which products should be protected in the future through the 'bauhausdessau' brand?"; a registered trademark since the beginning of 2001. Heated discussions took place during recent months on the marketing rights associated with this label. The topics dealt, among others, with design drafts that had been produced at the Bauhaus Dessau and the "ifs and hows" of licenses to be marketed for the first time. Rendering the Bauhaus spirit to apply to today's times is a task that demands both commitment and expertise. As Grete Reichardt once said: "The Bauhaus is a challenge to a person's entire being". On behalf of all those at the Bauhaus, as well as its fans, that's exactly how things should stay.
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