The Women of the Bauhaus: The Artists History Nearly Forgot
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There's a 1927 photograph of architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer sitting in one of his own tubular steel chairs, arms crossed, flanked by three women who look like they've wandered in from a punk band forty years too early. The photographer, Erich Consemüller, gave it a title that's aged into a punchline: Marcel Breuer and His Harem. The joke was the exact opposite of what the photo shows. Breuer looks faintly suspicious of the three women beside him, and for good reason. They weren't decoration. They were fellow artists at the Bauhaus, the radical German art school that promised total equality between men and women from its very first manifesto, then spent the next fourteen years quietly working out how to walk that promise back.
Quick Answers
Were women allowed to study at the Bauhaus? Yes, officially on equal terms with men from the school's founding in 1919, but in practice most female students were steered into a single workshop rather than the full range of subjects on offer.
Who was the only female master at the Bauhaus? Gunta Stölzl, who ran the weaving workshop and turned it into the school's most commercially successful department, was the only woman ever given the title of master.
A Promise With a Loophole Built In
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 on the principle that every eligible person, regardless of age or sex, would be accepted on talent alone. Women applied in huge numbers, and Gropius seems to have been genuinely startled by how many showed up. Within a year the school had issued a new policy, quietly steering female students away from architecture, metalwork and the other core workshops and into what got labelled, without much subtlety, the Women's Department. In practice that meant weaving, pottery and bookbinding, crafts already coded as feminine and considered lower status than the departments reserved for men.
Even that narrower path kept getting narrower. The pottery workshop's own master, Gerhard Marcks, pushed back hard against having women in his department at all, and bookbinding shut down within a couple of years. That left weaving as more or less the only place a female student could actually build a career, and by 1920 to 1921 it was, unsurprisingly, the single largest class at the school, with seventeen women and just two men enrolled against classes of seven or so elsewhere. One of Gropius's own colleagues, Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer, summed up the prevailing attitude bluntly: where there's wool, he said, there's a woman who weaves, if only to pass the time.
Gunta Stölzl Turns the Women's Department Into the Bauhaus's Biggest Success
Gunta Stölzl arrived in Weimar in 1919 after training in painting and ceramics and serving as a Red Cross nurse during the war, and found herself funnelled straight into weaving along with almost every other woman at the school. Rather than treat it as a consolation prize, she rebuilt it from the ground up. Early on there was barely any equipment to work with, and Stölzl later recalled Gropius sending the weavers out to beg leftover fabric, thread and lace off elderly women around Weimar. She pushed the workshop away from decorative, one-off pieces and toward genuinely modern, industrially minded textile design, and by the time the school moved to Dessau she'd made weaving the most profitable workshop the Bauhaus had.
That work earned her the title of junior master in 1927 and full master the year after, the only woman to ever hold the rank at the Bauhaus. She didn't get to keep it for long. In 1931, under political pressure that had as much to do with her being married to a Jewish architect as with anything to do with textiles, she was forced out a year before the Nazis shut the school down entirely. She emigrated to Switzerland, started her own hand-weaving business, Handweberei Flora, and ran it for nearly three decades.
Marianne Brandt Talks Her Way Into the Metal Workshop
Marianne Brandt didn't want to weave. She wanted metalwork, a department that, like architecture, was considered a male preserve, and she only got in because László Moholy-Nagy, the workshop's form master, recognised her talent and pushed for her admission. Even then the welcome was cold. Brandt later wrote that her male colleagues weren't pleased to have her there, admitting as much to her years afterwards, and handed her the dullest, most tedious jobs going in the meantime.
She kept at it anyway, and the results became some of the most recognisable objects to come out of the entire Bauhaus. Her 1924 geometric teapot, designed as a student piece, is now held by the Museum of Modern Art and regularly described as Bauhaus design distilled into a single object. Her ashtrays and ceiling lamps went into actual industrial production, which was more than most of her male colleagues' student work ever managed. She went on to run the metal workshop herself from 1928 to 1929, one of the very few women at the Bauhaus to lead a department outside weaving.
Otti Berger Patents a Revolution, Then Loses Everything to the Nazis
Otti Berger arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927, already an accomplished weaver, and pushed the craft somewhere none of her contemporaries had taken it. She treated textile design as something closer to engineering, developing new fabric blends and registering patents under names like Lamé-plume, becoming the only Bauhaus designer to ever patent her textile work. The Dutch weaving firm De Ploeg, which normally kept its designers anonymous, made an exception and let her initials appear alongside her patterns. She became deputy to Lilly Reich in the textile workshop and eventually ran the weaving department herself in its final year.
None of that protected her once the Nazis took power. In 1936 they revoked her licence to work as a textile designer because she was Jewish, forcing her to close the studio she'd built in Berlin. She tried repeatedly to emigrate, spending stretches in London and even receiving an invitation from Moholy-Nagy to join the New Bauhaus in Chicago, but her mother's illness pulled her back to Yugoslavia and the paperwork never came through in time. She was deported to Auschwitz with her family in 1944 and killed there, aged 45. Her brother Otto was the only member of the family to survive.
Lucia Moholy Photographs the Bauhaus, Then Gets Written Out of It
Almost everything the world knows the Bauhaus looked like comes from one photographer's work. Lucia Moholy, trained in publishing and photography before she married artist László Moholy-Nagy, spent years documenting the school's buildings, workshops and objects on large glass plate negatives, work she was rarely paid for and mostly did in her husband's shadow. When she fled Berlin in 1933 after the Nazis came to power, she left around 560 of those negatives behind for safekeeping with her husband and, eventually, with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.
She never got them back in any meaningful way for decades. In 1938 Gropius used roughly fifty of her uncredited images to help build the Museum of Modern Art's landmark Bauhaus exhibition and catalogue, the show that did more than almost anything else to cement the school's reputation internationally, without naming her once. When she found her own photographs sitting uncredited in that catalogue years later, she began writing to Gropius asking for the negatives back. He denied having them until she brought in a lawyer, and it took until 1957, and a settlement that arrived, pointedly, cash on delivery, for her to recover just 230 of the original 560. The rest have never resurfaced. She later described the whole episode as a fully fledged conspiracy carried out against her.
Anni Albers Calls Weaving 'Sissy' Work, Then Redefines It
Anni Albers, born Annelise Fleischmann in Berlin, arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922 wanting nothing to do with textiles. She later admitted she considered weaving too sissy, closer to needlepoint than to real art, and only ended up at a loom because it was the one workshop consistently open to women. She married fellow student Josef Albers in 1925, worked as Gunta Stölzl's assistant, and by 1929 was standing in as acting director of the weaving workshop herself, having long since abandoned any idea that the medium was beneath her.
When the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, the couple emigrated to the United States, both of them Jewish and with few other options left. Josef was invited to run the art programme at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Anni built an entirely new weaving department there from scratch, later folding in what she learned from research trips to Mexico and Peru studying pre-Columbian textiles. In 1949 she became the first weaver ever given a solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, a recognition none of her Bauhaus-era female colleagues who'd stayed in Europe ever lived to see. She kept working for another four decades, moving into printmaking in her sixties, and remains, of everyone to come out of the Bauhaus's weaving workshop, the name most people would actually recognise today.
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher Escapes the Loom Entirely
Not every woman who broke out of the Women's Department went into metal or photography. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher started in weaving in 1922 like almost everyone else, then switched into the wood sculpture and joinery workshop within a year, one of the few female students to get out of textiles altogether. She found her real subject almost immediately: children's furniture and toys designed around the idea that a child's room should genuinely belong to the child, with brightly painted, wheeled crates they could rearrange however they liked rather than fixed, adult-designed furniture.
Her best known design, the Kleine Schiffbauspiel, a small set of colourful wooden shipbuilding blocks, came out of a children's room she built for the Bauhaus's first public exhibition in 1923 and is still manufactured and sold today, one of the very few Bauhaus designs by any student, male or female, still in production nearly a century later. None of that translated into job security. Gropius never offered her a permanent position at the school, and after she married and started a family her design career effectively ended, since her husband's acting work meant the family moved constantly and she was never in one place long enough to rebuild a workshop of her own. She was killed in an Allied bombing raid near Frankfurt in September 1944, one of the last letters she wrote telling her son that even in bleak times there were always a few cheerful hours worth holding onto.
The Photograph Behind the Joke
Which brings the story back to that 1927 photograph. The three women in it were Martha Erps, Katt Both and Ruth Hollós, and they weren't Breuer's harem in any sense beyond the sarcastic title Consemüller gave the print. Erps was married to Breuer himself. Hollós was married to Consemüller, the photographer who took the shot, and by most accounts looks like she's fighting off laughter as she looks toward her own husband behind the camera. All three were working Bauhaus artists in their own right, not models borrowed for the occasion, and the joke of the title only really lands once you know how radical the school's gender mix actually was for the period, roughly matching the general population rather than the all-male roll call most people picture when they think of Bauhaus masters.
Gropius himself, for all the school's internal contradictions, wrote that the point of the whole project was to call for and build the construction of the future together, architecture, sculpture and painting combined into one. It's just that for a long stretch of the Bauhaus's fourteen years, together turned out to mean something narrower for its women than for its men, and how far that movement could otherwise have gone is one of the genuine open questions left by the Nazis shutting it down in 1933.
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The Bauhaus's women weren't the only ones pushing against the limits set for them in Weimar-era Germany. Read about Anita Berber, the dancer who became the scandalous face of the same era, or Atelier d'Ora-Benda, the Vienna photography studio run by another woman shaping the era's visual language from behind the camera.
