The women of the Bauhaus

Think Bauhaus, think design. The German school, founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius, was a creative hothouse, and later powerhouse, with a singular artistic vision. The buildings, furniture and domestic objects it produced were made up of sleek lines, clean planes and basic geometric forms. The Bauhaus aesthetic was modernist and minimalist, rational and functional. When the school relocated to Dessau in 1925, Gropius himself designed the new premises. An architectural wonder of glass, steel and concrete comprising studios, workshops, classrooms, offices and a so-called Festbereich, or ‘events area’, the building encapsulated the Bauhaus ethos. It was simple yet innovative, a triumph of both style and substance.

But the Bauhaus wasn’t solely a school of design. Another great misconception abounds. Much has been written about the male artists who lectured there, such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, and many photographs from the era show male students at work and at play. But the Bauhaus wasn’t exclusively a man’s world. Gropius’ 1919 manifesto announced that the school was open to ‘any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex’. Although grossly outnumbered by men, women still applied and attended to take advantage of what was unique access to art education. Most were encouraged to take up supposedly feminine subjects, such as weaving and ceramics. However, a number refused to be slotted into a gender-specific pigeonhole and pursued photography instead. Throughout the 1920s, women photographers made their presence felt at the Bauhaus: some took pictures that were used to advertise the products created by the school; others prioritised art and radically experimented with the formal possibilities of photography. In 1929, when the school established a photography course, almost half of the students who signed up for professional training with the camera were women.

A superlative exhibition at the Museum of Photography in Berlin focuses on the pioneering female artists who viewed life through a lens. New Woman, New Vision: Women Photographers of the Bauhaus assembles over 300 photographs that showcase a diverse range of subject matter and artistic techniques. A lot of the images are, to use that shopworn word, iconic. However, many of the women who created them didn’t get the recognition they deserved at the time and drifted into obscurity. Only now can we appreciate their individual talents and collective impact.

The opening section, entitled ‘Viewing the Self’, looks at how the photographers turned their gaze on themselves. There are traditional pictures: Gertrud Arndt and Marianne Brandt pose demurely and ostentatiously with flowers and jewellery; Arndt is then seen exploring her identity in a variety of guises with costumes, masks and veils.

Things become less conventional when we glimpse Grit Kallin-Fischer lying on her back, one arm languidly draped over the other. With her short hair, short minidress, and cigarette burning between her fingers, she fully embodies the archetype of the New Woman, an exemplar of both independence and resistance.

Then there are the more bizarre shots involving reflections and distortions: Brandt’s warped image duplicated in metal spheres; Ise Gropius’ profile reproduced in a tapering row of mirrors; Florence Henri’s black-clad top half staring back at her through the looking glass.

In another section we find more portraits, this time of friends, colleagues and partners. There are intimate close-ups of men asleep, their vulnerability accentuated by soft lighting and the camera looking down on them from above. Happy women’s faces are captured from below. The grimy and bedraggled Bauhaus cleaner looks like she works in a mine rather than a school. A caption informs us that, in Walter Peterhans’ classes, students were taught to meticulously arrange their still lifes and tease out the textures of the hair, skin and clothing of their models, even the textiles of the furniture they sat on or reclined against. Exhibits bear this out: in Ivana Meller-Tomljenović’s 1930 image of a woman in a chair, the light sharpens the subject’s cheekbones, filters through the lines of her skirt and makes her halter-neck top shimmer.

Some portraits feel too staged and too stylised, particularly those of dancers at rest, grandmothers in their finery and a pensive Bertolt Brecht. More interesting are the photographs from the large section ‘People and Places’. Here we glimpse photographs taken on the move and off the cuff, both at home and in far-flung locations. Many of the individuals in the pictures don’t even know that a Leica is trained on them. Children play in the street in Chicago. Berlin football fans without tickets furtively watch a match at a distance through cracks in a fence. Two Berlin images present descents to different destinations: in one, bathers walk down steps in monochrome sunshine to Wannsee’s open-air lido; in the other, children reach the halfway point of the staircase at the eerily deserted Neukölln U-Bahn station.

Back above ground there are bustling street scenes in Paris and shots of rural life in South America. All these photographs are refreshing. They exude vitality and spontaneity. We sense that each photographer enjoyed taking them under these circumstances and on her own terms: no constrained studio shots, no fastidiously put-together compositions, no rigid rules.

Elsewhere, in the section ‘The Allure of Architecture’, people give way to place. Structures are not shown in their entirety; instead, photographers home in on original features and emphasise their strangeness through disorientating perspectives. We view the thick blocks, glass panels and domino-like balconies of the Bauhaus buildings; the staggered ziggurat side of a New York skyscraper; the serried rows of striped awnings on a German Konditorei. Bomb-ravaged Berlin buildings from 1945 look like they are either disintegrating into rubble or sprouting out of it. The inner framework of the city’s radio tower, seen from the ground up, is a tangled mass of girders.

The most challenging photography on display is left until last. ‘Art and Experimentation’ gathers together more avant-garde work. Photograms depict playful ghosts. Collages of magazine photos and newspaper text constitute surreal friezes. One or two abstract montages made up of a further mishmash of mediums defy description and simply have to be seen to be believed. This section provokes mixed emotions. In places we are stimulated and regard a piece as the result of an artist letting her imagination run wild. At other points we are left cold, and dismiss a work that strives for significance as a slapdash cut-and-paste job.

At its core, the exhibition is a celebration of remarkable women who used photography to record their surroundings and portray themselves in fascinating ways. Potted biographies of the photographers add context. They also reveal the hardships these women endured throughout their careers. Elsa Thiemann (1910-81) and Etel Mittag-Fodor (1905-2005) capitalised on the photojournalism boom in the 1920s and 1930s and sold their images of modern life in cosmopolitan cities to photo agencies for distribution to newspapers and magazines. But their work was published either anonymously or under the name of the photo agency, which made it almost impossible for them to make a name for themselves within their field. When the Nazis came to power and the Bauhaus closed, several photographers were forced to abandon their craft and go on the run. Prague-born Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), who secured a reputation as one of the foremost female architectural photographers of her time, fled Berlin in 1933 and had to leave her negatives behind. However, many of them ended up in the possession of Walter Gropius. He published her images to raise the profile of the school and its architecture but failed to credit her as their creator. It wasn’t until 1957 that Moholy’s negatives were returned to her, following a prolonged legal dispute.

Irena Blühová (1904-91), who documented social injustice and political turmoil in photo form for the leftist workers’ newspaper Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, found herself faced with a different kind of erasure. She returned to her native Czechoslovakia and became a fighter in the antifascist resistance. She had to go into hiding in Bratislava in 1942, during which time all her negatives were destroyed. Only after the war did she manage to reconstruct her work from previously published photographs.

A rich selection of that work is on show here. These photographs and others like them are particularly special. What Blühová restored and Moholy reclaimed can be admired now as both striking snapshots and salvaged artefacts.

New Woman, New Vision: Women Photographers of the Bauhaus is at the Museum of Photography, Berlin until 4 October.