Zines : Women of the Bauhaus ( part2)
"The more frightening the world becomes ... the more art becomes abstract." - Wassily Kandinsky
Hello! It’s Lea again.
I hope you had a great week. If you don’t know me, it's nice to meet you! This is Sunday Spreads, my personal illustration challenge. This week, I continued researching Women Artists who studied/taught/forged the Bauhaus, this iconic German School of Architecture and Design from the 1920s/30s.
I started from the birth of the Bauhaus school from our wonderful villain director of the school Walter Gropius and explored the path of 2 bright women artists, Alma Busher and Marianne Brandt.
So let's drive back in with 3 more artists. First Lucia Moholy, who unlike the others arrived at the Bauhaus not as a student but as the wife of one of the students who became a teacher, the designer László Moholy-Nagy. She was always in his shadow, being his German translator and editor of his work.
But she was an incredible photographer, capturing the buildings, the students, and their work. Unfortunately, she had to flee Germany, leaving more than 500 negatives behind. It was only after the War that she would see her pictures again … in exhibitions to promote the Bauhaus around the world… without any credit to her. So dear Walter Gropius ( this guy again, seriously…) just used her pictures for years in publications, exhibitions, and Bauhaus projects, without crediting her, again and again.
After years of legal battle against Gropius, she got 300 negatives back, but could not profit from them anymore as they had been used for years for many publications. After her death, her collection went to the Bauhaus Archive. And still to this day, she remains in the shadow of the cultural heritage of the Bauhaus. Just to quote a great episode of the podcast 99% Invisible on Lucia Moholy:
"Scholars like Robin Schuldenfrei say that Lucia’s photographs are the best representation we have of the Bauhaus. In a way, it’s like those photographs are the Bauhaus.”
Here is the link to the podcast below if you're curious!
And here is the final zine:
And in sequence:
Going back to the students of the Bauhaus, I want to talk a bit about Gunta Stölzl. She was a bright student who studied at the Bauhaus after being a nurse in War World I. I mentioned before that Gropius believed women should stick to weaving and in general 2D art, to limit their potential. Gunta Became a legendary textile designer, recognized internationally for her abstract textile designs inspired by the classes she had with Klee and Kandinsky.
She later became a master and teacher of the textile design department and taught many bright women for years.
Here is the final zine:
And in sequence:
And finally Friedl Dicker, an incredible artist with a tragic fate. It was said that she could do 100 perfect charcoal drawings in 10 minutes. She was an incredibly versatile artist, doing paintings, graphic design, toy making, and interior design, using a lot of different materials to explore her art, inspired by the teachings of Klee and Kandinsky.
During the War, as she was Jewish and a Communist, she was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where she taught many children how to draw and tried as much as she could to distract them and transmit to them the teachings she had learned in the Bauhaus. She was finally transferred to Auschwitz where she was killed, and thousands of children's drawings were found in a suitcase after the war.
Here is the final zine:
In sequence:
And here is the timelapse of all the zines!
This series took everything out of me, honestly! But I’m glad I finished it. There are many more women Artists I would’ve loved to portray, from the Bauhaus but also from everywhere in the world. From a 2022 study, in the US: Women’s Art is only 11% of the art displayed in museums, and only 15% in exhibitions. Also, Artists in 18 Major US Museums Are 85% White and 87% Male (source). Those numbers are just incredibly depressing. And the path of these bright women artists of the Bauhaus and their fight from almost a century ago still feels relevant today.
Anyway, Let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to reach out. I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.
Lea
