Women's Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus by Sigrid Wortmann Weltge

From the Publisher

Resurrecting the work of gifted craftswomen, too long denied their place as pioneers in their field, Women's Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus unearths a missing chapter in the story of the most important institution in the history of modern design. The Bauhaus defined modern design in the twentieth century. As the preeminent design phenomenon of the era, almost every aspect of it has been minutely examined. Yet the Weaving Workshop, the longest standing and most successful of all Bauhaus workshops, has been neglected for one simple reason: when the first wave of brilliantly talented women arrived at the school, they soon discovered that Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius could not sustain his ringing declaration of equality between "the beautiful and the strong gender." Textiles, in the hierarchy of art and design, were to be "women's work." Their results, however, were remarkable, both in the early days of artistic expression in Weimar and in later developments in the textile industry. The craftswomen responded to the demands of advanced technology with fabrics that incorporated new or unusual materials such as Cellophane, leather and early synthetics, which had acoustic and light-reflecting properties. They produced multi-layered fabrics, cloths with double and triple weaves, and later made extensive use of the jacquard loom. The result was a rebirth of hand-weaving and new professionalism in designing textiles for mass production. In this model study, superlatively documented with rare or little-seen photographs of the textiles and their makers, Sigrid Wortmann Weltge captures the heady atmosphere of creative excitement at the Bauhaus. Original archival research and interviews, both with survivors and their students and with leading contemporary designers, detail the workshop's history and its enduring legacy. When the Nazis closed the institution in 1933, its members dispersed to Switzerland, Holland, England, France, Russia, Mexico, and throughout the United

Publishers Weekly

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and other male leaders of the famous interwar German art school steered women applicants into the weaving workshop because they considered textiles to be ``women's work.'' With designs ranging from severely geometrical to riotously colorful, weavers like Gunta Stolzl, Benita Otte, Anni Albers and Marli Ehrman made the Bauhaus workshop an innovative laboratory which set standards for textile production worldwide. After the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, its weavers dispersed to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to California's Pond Farm Community and to the New Bauhaus established in Chicago by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Their legacy of free experimentation led to a rebirth of handweaving in the U.S. Beautifully written and illustrated, this study unearths a major chapter in Bauhaus history. Weltge is an art history professor at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. (Nov.)

BookList

Most commonly associated with the Bauhaus are the world-famous architects Gropius and Mies van der Rohe and, to a lesser extent, the artists Kandinsky and Klee. Yet Professor Weltge opens up design vistas by capturing the spirit of the school's weaving workshop, one almost exclusively ruled by women in pre-World War II Germany. Interlaced with a thorough explanation of the Bauhaus commitment to the cross-fertilization between art and technology are very human tales: the school's moves from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, the loss of 20 to 30 artists at Hitler's hands, and the exile to various countries and the subsequent reestablishment of the Bauhaus' ethos in foreign lands. Period photographs, sketches, and surviving textile examples help attest to the Bauhaus' revolution in design, a motif now well appreciated by collectors and professionals alike.

Booknews

The Weaving Workshop was the only domain for women artists at the Bauhaus (the German school of design that operated from 1919 through 1933). The text tells about the women of the workshop and the context of their work and art, the progression of the school and its edicts, the changes wrought by the mechanized loom and mass production, and the legacy of the Bauhaus. The 200 photographs feature textile designs that were so far ahead of their time that many appear contemporary. This is an important book for its detailing of the school, the times, women artists, and the Workshop, considered to be the preeminent design phenomenon of the 20th century. 9x11.5" Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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