The following essay reconstructs the 1921–22 academic year that Anni Albers, still Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann (1899–1994; she married Josef Albers in 1925), spent at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg [Hamburg State School of Arts and Crafts], immediately prior to her legendary period of study at the Bauhaus. My research is based on relatively sparse archival materials, which nevertheless enable some adjustments to be made to the apparently dependable biography of this renowned weaver, textile artist, designer, printmaker, university lecturer, and theoretician. ¹ Biographical summery of the time since her studies in Hamburg: from 1922, State Bauhaus in Weimar; preliminary course with Johannes Itten and Georg Muche; forced assignment to the weaving class, where in 1928/29 and 1930/31 she is deputy head of the workshop; 1929/30 diploma with her so-called silver fabric, “a silver-shimmering wall hanging that distributed light throughout the lecture hall (of the Trade Union School of the General German Trade Union Federation in Bernau near Berlin) and at the same time adeptly absorbed noises coming from the surrounding rooms . . .”, last accessed 22 March 2021). Following the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, emigration to the U.S.; Josef Albers was hired to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933, Anni Albers as Assistant Professor only in 1939; parallel work in the field of textile art and as an independent textile designer of hand-woven and machine-made fabrics. 1949, first ever personal exhibition dedicated to a textile artist at the MoMA. Between 1935 and 1967, thirteen research trips to Mexico as well as one trip to Peru and Chile respectively, with a focus on pre-Columbian art, in particular on traditional weaving techniques and their patterns, which are received as ‘abstract’; practical and theoretical involvement with textile design and, from the mid-1960s until the end of her life, particularly with printmaking.

Above all, however, I attempt to address the potentials and problems raised by an arts and crafts school of this period through the individual experience voiced by Albers in her predominantly late memoirs and in art historical monographs. This enables me to speculate on why the symbolic capital of applied art schools, which was and still is considerably lower than that of art academies, is perpetuated into the biographies of women artists. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 with the programmatic claim to abolish the clear-cut separation between applied and fine arts and thereby to realize a visionary curriculum, also in the sense of gender equality. This radical new theory and practice of design aimed to remodel ‘outdated’ applied arts towards an innovative approach to handicraft and industrial production. If little attention has been paid to Anni Albers’ year of study in Hamburg, this, on the one hand, has to do with the powerful, even mythical dimension of the art historiography of the Bauhaus as an institution. In order to establish and consolidate this myth, the school of applied arts, which figured as the most recent structural forerunner in this particular field of education, had to be portrayed as directly overtaken by history, therefore antiquated, or be bluntly suppressed. Here, on the other hand, a gender dispositive is at play. Until well into the 20th century, women had no opportunity to enroll in academic art training in the disciplines of painting or sculpting. Denied access to public art academies, they were left to study art at the few women’s painting schools run by women artists’ associations, or more commonly at––costly––private art schools. Even at a public school of arts and crafts such as the Hamburg institution, women students were only admitted from April 1907––not exactly early. ² A few dates from the German-speaking context on the opening of artistic and applied arts training centres to women: Akademie Kassel 1777; Städelschule 1849 (according to the statutes; as no student registers have survived, not verifiable); Akademie Wien 1897; Akademie Weimar 1902; Akademie Königsberg 1902; Kunstgewerbeschule Breslau 1884/85; Kunstgewerbeschule Wien 1899 (on the Viennese situation also: Die Frauen der / Women Artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, last accessed 21 May 2024, MAK.digiSTORY conceived by Gabriele Fabiankowitsch and Thaddäus Stockert and realised with the support of Simona Reisch and Nikolaus Ruchnewitz); Kunstgewerbeschule München 1872 (Cf. Yvette Deseyve, Der Künstlerinnen-Verein München e.V. und seine Damenakademie. Eine Studie zur Ausbildungssituation von Künstlerinnen im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, München 2005); Anne-Kathrin Herber, Frauen an deutschen Kunstakademien im 20. Jahrhundert. Ausbildungsmöglichkeiten für Künstlerinnen ab 1919 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der süddeutschen Kunstakademien, (dissertation) Heidelberg 2009, last accessed 21 May 2024; therein historical reviews of the time before 1919 as well as references to the arts and crafts situation, especially pp. 45–47 as well as spread over the elaborations.

Just over a decade later, around 1920, applied arts were already received as the domain of women––and had thus lost cultural prestige and aesthetic worth. This differed from the situation in the second half of the 19th century, in which the promise of modernism to infuse everyday life with art and to implement ‘artistic culture’ had enhanced the reputation and contemporary relevance of the arts and crafts, even from the perspective of ‘fine artists’. But with the significant change of socio-political circumstances that prevailed in 1921, this modernism had already well passed its halfway mark ³ Cf. Klaus-Jürgen Sembach (ed.), 1910. Halbzeit der Moderne. Van de Velde, Behrens, Hoffmann und die anderen, Stuttgart 1992.: women had only recently been granted the right to vote, the First World War was barely over, and, from the onset, the social and cultural awakening promised by the Weimar Republic and its parliamentary democracy was tainted by fiercely opposed political battles.

Coming from a privileged background––her mother from the German-Jewish Ullstein publishing family, her father from a German-Jewish mirror glass dynasty and himself a furniture manufacturer––Annelise ⁴ Also Anneliese, as in the birth registry of 1899 at the register office of Charlottenburg; p. 43, entry 616 (last accessed 20 March 2021); on the subsequent birth certificate of 6 April 1925, presumably issued for her marriage, Annelise; here her father is noted as “salesman”. Fleischmann was encouraged in her artistic interests at an early age. Her mother hired a house tutor for art lessons, ⁵ “ . . . at age sixteen, she (Anni Albers) drew a live nude model under the tutelage of Tonischka Meyer, her beloved art tutor . . . ” Nicholas Fox Weber, Anni & Josef Albers. Equal and Unequal, New York, London 2020, p. 58. Despite extensive research in Berlin address books, I was neither able to find an artist with this name nor to clarify whether it was a man or a woman. and from 1916 the young woman attended courses in painting with Martin Brandenburg (1870–1919) at the Studienateliers für Malerei und Plastik ⁶ Founded in 1901 by Arthur Lewin-Funcke on the model of the Académie Julien in Paris, the Studienateliers für Malerei und Plastik are located at least until 1934 at Kantstrasse 159 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The Berlin ceramicist, Hedwig Bollhagen, the German-South African painter Irma Stern, and Paul Citroen (who like Annelise Fleischmann also later studied at the Bauhaus) were also students at the Lewin-Funcke-Schule, the name under which the school was known. „When she studied with Martin Brandenburg, she would have painted still lifes and landscapes in what by then had become a classic Impressionist style devoid of black, as we know from Anni’s woeful recollection of its having been forbidden. We also know that she made a watercolor showing young women seated on a bench at a stop for an omnibus.” (Weber 2020, p. 58). Weber further characterizes the school as follows: “The art school at which he [Brandenburg taught Anni––the Studienatelier(s) für Malerei und Plastik––was exclusively for young women.” (Weber 2020, p. 57). Photographs, however, show mixed-gender students sculpting in front of models of both sexes. See: lewin-funcke.de/lewin-funcke-schule.html, last accessed 7 March 2021. Arthur Lewin-Funcke’s granddaughter, Katrin Weyert, recounts that her grandfather had deliberately set up “gender-neutral” classes (email to the author, 16 March 2021). A further inconsistency in the statement that Annelise Fleischmann took classes there between 1916 and 1919 is that, due to illness, Martin Brandenburg taught at the Studienateliers only until the summer of 1918. She therefore can hardly have taken classes with him up until 1919. See: Detlef Lorenz, “Martin Brandenburg”, Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, vol. XIII, 1996, p. 609; last accessed 10 March 2021.], a private art school. But it was the intermezzo of Oskar Kokoschka’s rejection of her application for painting––the painter had moved to Dresden in 1917 where he was appointed professor at the art academy in 1919––repeatedly referenced in Anni Albers’ biography, that took her to Hamburg: “An attempt to take classes with Oskar Kokoschka failed; he told her she would do better to become a housewife and mother. ⁷ Another, less sexist, but likewise psychologically discouraging and misogynistic account of the exchange with Kokoschka reads: “And he had one look at that and said, ‘Why do you paint?’ I was fifteen or sixteen so that was the smashing answer and that was the end of that.” Cited after: Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, “Anni Albers 1899-1994”, in: Nicholas Fox Weber and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi (ed.), Anni Albers, exhibition cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 1999, pp. 152–181, p. 154. Anni Albers’ age must have slipped in her memory, because Kokoschka was in Dresden from 1917 only. Annelise Fleischmann was already eighteen years old at the time. It is then that she applied to the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg where she spent two boring semesters in an embroidery course.” ⁸ Ulrike Müller, “Anni Albers”, in: idem, Bauhaus-Frauen: Meisterinnen in Kunst, Handwerk und Design, Munich 2019 (first edition 2009), pp. 46–51, p. 47. Her move to Hamburg may be interpreted as an indication of her desire to study ‘fine art’ painting and at the same time of her irritation at the seemingly boundless freedom of expression offered by painting. In addition, the pressure of expectations on a young bourgeois woman’s domestic vocation for her future role as a married lady of society and mother ⁹ Anni Albers’ brother Hans ((1909-2002); in his exile in the U.S. he took on the surname of Farman) recounts in 1998 that the female members of the family were expected to, “get married on their own . . . whereas the sons inherited the [family fortune.” Cited after: Asbaghi 1999, p. 153.] should not be underrated. Another conceivable influence could have come from her father’s furniture business and associated questions of design. In 1968, at nearly seventy years of age, Anni Albers explains and emphasizes the challenge and potentials of materials: “And also I was at that time interested in painting and I felt that the tremendous freedom of the painter was scaring me and I was looking for some way to find my way a little more securely . . . And I find that a craft gives somebody who is trying to find his way a kind of discipline. And this discipline was driven in earlier periods through the technique that was necessary for a painter to learn. In the Renaissance they had to grind their paints, they had to prepare their canvas or wood panels. And they were very limited really in the handling of the material. While today you buy the paint in any paint store and squeeze it and the panels come readymade and there is nothing that teaches you the care that materials demand.” ¹⁰ Transcribed oral history interview by Sevim Fesci with Anni Albers in New Haven, CT, 5 July 1968; https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-anni-albers-12134#transcript (last accessed 17 February 2021). Not entirely without contradiction, Annelise Fleischmann wanted to study painting at the Bauhaus, but after the preliminary course, like most women students, she was directed towards the weaving workshop. At the same time, Anni Albers distances herself from the early stages of her artistic biography and reminisces about her two initial experiences as a student: “I had been to an art school and an applied arts school in Germany, which I felt were very unsatisfactory.” ¹¹ Fesci 1968. Almost 30 years later, in 1999, we read: “In 1920 [sic! 1921/22; figure 1 and 2] Albers attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (school of applied arts) in Hamburg. After two months she was disappointed with the learning program and sought out other sorts of instruction.” ¹² Asbaghi 1999, p. 154. Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation for over three decades, had already in 1989 literally embellished the nature of her disappointment to a near caricature: “ . . . however, two months spent on floral wallpaper designs where more than enough for her.” ¹³ Nicholas Fox Weber, “Begegnungen mit Anni Albers”, in: Anni und Josef Albers. Eine Retrospektive, exhibition cat., Villa Stuck, Munich and Albers-Museum Bottrop, Munich 1989, pp. 20–35, p. 22. Likewise, in his most current publication on the life and work of the Albers’––Anni & Josef Albers. Equal and Unequal, 2020––the author merely reiterates the brevity of her studies in Hamburg together with her skepticism towards the assignments: “Anni went to the school in Hamburg for two months. She was restless there, calling it ‘sissy stuff, mainly needlepoint.’” ¹⁴ Weber 2020, p. 58. Here also, the period of two months is not documented and Anni Albers’ resistance to the practical art classes remains without source. The rhetoric is certainly pointed and yet it does bring to light the conditions and implicit problems of an individual quest for an arts and crafts school after the First World War and more specifically those concerning Annelise Fleischmann’s direct learning environment. Her “Zeugniszettel” [credentials card]––such is the heading of the original document––shows that she took part in Friedrich Adler’s teaching program for two semesters, namely the “class for ornamental art” with 42 hours a week. She completes both semesters with the best grade in diligence; in each, she is certified as making good progress (grade 2); in her second semester, her initially satisfactory (grade 3) performance increases to good (grade 2). ¹⁵ Cf. Annelise Fleischmann’s credentials card, archive of the HFBK Hamburg. In March 1918, Adler (1878-1942, murdered in Auschwitz) had been prematurely released from military service for health reasons and resumed his post at the institute as “urgently needed” ¹⁶ Letter of 21 December 1917 of the director of the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg, Richard Meyer, to Friedrich Adler, in: Friedrich Adler employee file, archive of the HFBK Hamburg. in a war-affected and reduced teaching schedule. Only one year after the inauguration in 1913 of the new Schumacher building of the School of Arts and Crafts, a reserve hospital with 200 beds had been established there and was to remain in operation until March 1919. ¹⁷ Cf. Monika Ankele, “Die Kunstgewerbeschule Lerchenfeld als Lazarett”, in: idem, Lebenszeichen. Fotopostkarten aus den Lazaretten des Ersten Weltkriegs, accompanying exhibition brochure, Medizinhistorisches Museum Hamburg 2018, pp. 32–33, p. 32. However, it must not only have been a matter of bridging teaching restrictions or the interruption of classes. Far more, the cultural and social climate in combination with the economic premises for a commercially successful cooperation of the arts and crafts with industry and private assignments had been subject to momentous changes. Is it then surprising that for an ambitious young woman like Annelise Fleischmann any explicit reference to the techniques, products, and patterns of the arts and crafts dating back to the beginning of the century would literally and figuratively seem anachronistic, boring, and a waste of time? Was she familiar with Ornament and Crime (1908), Adolf Loos’ polemical and fundamental rejection of functionless ornament and applied decoration? Was she, on the other hand, aware of artist Hannah Höch’s (1889-1978) call to reform women’s widespread handicraft practices––and had received it skeptically? Perhaps she was simply in the wrong category of addressees for studying arts and crafts: too upper-middle-class and too rebellious? Höch, who studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Charlottenburg and then at the Berlin Arts and Crafts Museum Institute, earned a living by working three days a week at the handicrafts department of the Ullstein publishing house. In an emancipatory activist tone, she writes in her essay “Vom Sticken [On Embroidery]”, 1918: “Just as it does not suffice in painting today to replicate naturalistic little flowers, a still life, or a nude, so certainly must an abstract sense of form, and with it, beauty, feeling, spirit, even soul come into future embroidery . . . But you, craftswomen, modern women, who believe that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral), who deem your feet are firmly planted in reality, at least y-o-u should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era.” ¹⁸ Hannah Höch, “Vom Sticken” (September 1918), in: Stickerei- und Spitzenrundschau, vol. XVIII, Darmstadt 1917/18, p. 219. Höch thus takes up the reform impulse from around 1900 for the applied arts, emphasizing the aesthetic dimension of textiles, especially embroidery, in an individual and challenging manner, and sets it against mass-produced mechanical handiwork. Her appeal implies opposing this ‘new’ embroidery to the comparatively conventional social understanding of the role of a craftswoman. In 1911, embroidery as a manual and mechanical skill in artistic design for the decoration of home and dress and to form the taste of vendors in the clothing industry was still the parole of the director of the Kunstgewerbeschule Hamburg, Richard Meyer, as the way ahead in the training of arts and craftswomen. This, however, was already outmoded in two senses. ¹⁹ Richard Meyer, “Stickereien der Staatlichen Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg”, in: Stickerei-Zeitung und Spitzen-Revue; 12, no. 2, 1912, pp. 45–50, with individual images of students’ works from Adler’s class until page 58.

At the beginning of his career in the first years of the 20th century, Adler had worked with utility textiles for his interior designs as a freelance craftsman and as a teacher, conceiving patterns for upholstery fabrics, curtains, wallpaper, carpets, and floor coverings, but much of this was not executed until after the First World War. ²⁰ Cf. Ernst Schäll, Friedrich Adler. Leben und Werk, Bad Buchau 2004, p. 106–107 (here especially the figure captions). For Adler, textiles were Initially rather marginal––his major areas of activity focusing on the design of furniture, interiors, tombstones, ceramics, and precious metalwork––in his early years in Hamburg he is even mentioned as a ‘sculptor’ ²¹ Cf. Rüdiger Joppien,Almut Klingbeil, “Friedrich Adler als Lehrer an der Hamburger Staatlichen Kunstgewerbeschule [ab 1928 Landeskunstschule” (1907–1933), in: Brigitte Leonhardt et al. (ed.), Friedrich Adler zwischen Jugendstil und Art Déco, catalogue of the eponymous exhibition at Münchner Stadtmuseum, Stuttgart 1994, pp. 412–424, p. 412.] ––but after 1920, at the time of Annelise Fleischmann’s studies, textiles are the predominant focus. ²² Cf. Jutta Zander-Seidel, “Friedrich Adler – Textilien”, in: Ibid., pp. 292–305, p. 292. In the mid-1920s, Adler applies for fabric printing patents, namely for the wax-resist dyeing developed from Javanese batik techniques, produces a fabric printing machine for industrial use, and establishes his own manufacturing and retail company. After ten years, production was discontinued due to it being unprofitable and because it was deemed politically undesirable by the National Socialists. Despite mechanical production, the fabrics were too expensive and could not compete with mass-produced goods. The authoress was the former head of the Textiles, Clothing, and Jewelry Collections of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and has written the most insightful and reliable article to date on Adler’s artistic textile work. The museum holds works by the craftsman, who had an added connection with the city through four master classes held at the Bayerisches Gewerbemuseum Nürnberg in 1910–13. Cf. Silvia Glaser, “Friedrich Adler und die kunstgewerblichen Meisterkurse am Bayerischen Gewerbemuseum Nürnberg”, in: Ibid., pp. 393–411, especially pp. 396–411.

Adler, now confronted with a very young, mainly female generation of first year students with basically no artistic or vocational experience––Annelise Fleischmann’s fellow students are on average 17 years old and come straight from school ²³ Cf. Joppien/Klingbeil 1994, p. 420. It is striking that the authors almost exclusively mention successful male craftsmen for the period of Adler’s apprenticeship between 1907 and 1914, while the opposite is true for the years after 1918. This is not only due to the consequences of the war, but also to the close pre-war cooperation with the workshops, typically with the metal workshop, that gave place after the war to a focus on textiles. As for Annelise Fleischmann’s presumed reserve towards her fellow students, she may not have been so excited about the legendary artists’ carnival parties for which Adler’s class at that time designed the décor. This was all abundantly familiar to her. Themed costume parties had been held at her parents’ house, for which the nine-room apartment had to be entirely cleared out to be transformed into, for example, the forest of Grunewald or a train station. Cf. Nicholas Fox Weber, “The Last Bauhausler”, in: Asbaghi 1999, pp. 124–151, p. 135; cf. also Hamburger Künstlerfeste, 1914–1933. Eine Künstlerfestchronik, on the occasion of the Friedrich Adler exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 1994; cf. also Rüdiger Joppien, Almut Klingbeil, “Friedrich Adler und die Hamburger Künstlerfeste”, in: Leonhardt et al. 1994, pp. 70–81, p. 74 (here on the party of 1922, the preparations of which could have been experienced by Adler’s student Annelise Fleischmann). ––remains true to his credo of distilling natural forms from the study of flora and fauna for the creation of surface decor in the sense of a ‘design of timeless relevance’ ²⁴ Cf. Joppien,Klingbeil 1994, p. 418, p. 420.; this was also in line with the increasing didactic importance of the basic curriculum for the very young students. Perhaps it is this type of exercise that Anni Albers summarizes in her recollections of the time in Hamburg as “floral wallpaper”. ²⁵ Cf. Weber 1989, p. 22. From 1919, Adler––and there is little evidence for this period––is said to have “instructed his students a good deal more in ornamental design and enthused them for the practice of textile printing.” ²⁶ Joppien, Klingbeil 1994, p. 421. Here, the authors supplement an oral source. A former Adler woman student reports that, in addition to the exercises in ornamentation, wallpaper designs were produced particularly for competitions that were organized by the Bauhaus. Adler was supposedly in contact with Marcel Breuer. This can however only have been the case after 1925, the year of Breuer’s appointment as a Bauhaus teacher (prior to that, he had been a student there). If this information is reliable, it would confirm that Adler indeed had the Bauhaus in mind, even if it was through his connection to Gropius and the Deutscher Werkbund. If we follow the art historian Jutta Zander-Seidel, batik was revived in the Adler class after 1918, both as an expressive drawing technique and well adapted to the emergency mode of the time as an undemanding method of design in reference to its material and spatial requirements. ²⁷ Cf. Zander-Seidel 1994, p. 296. Aesthetically, Zander-Seidel concludes that Adler’s late work is formally characterized by an “ambivalence between closeness to nature and abstraction that never leaves the representational realm and subordinates his textile works . . . to the all-time determinants of stylization in the real world.” ²⁸ Cf. Ibid., p. 304. Those innovative and historically radical new fabric textures which were soon developed by Annelise Fleischmann and her colleagues in the Bauhaus weaving class––with traditional and contemporary materials in both classical and experimental weaving techniques, unfolding their decorative effect in the graphic and geometric surface variance rather than in the pattern print––do not emerge from the considerations of form conveyed to Annelise Fleischmann in the relevant Hamburg period. ²⁹ Walter Gropius and Friedrich Adler knew each other as members of the Deutscher Werkbund and it is rumored that in 1933 Gropius tried to incite Adler to emigrate with him to the U.S. Cf. Schäll 2004, p. 26.

Looking back––now that Anni Albers has reached international recognition as a textile artist––one can speculate that the school’s curriculum, specifically the courses delivered by Friedrich Adler, and perhaps also by Maria Brinckmann ³⁰ Brinckmann was hired as the first female teacher in 1909, initially for art embroidery; from 1916 she headed the textile workshop., did indeed exert some influence on the artist, even if only as a catalyst for the confrontation with the obsolete aim for decoration to be ‘timelessly relevant’. Even if the 22-year-old did scorn needlepoint as “sissy” or girl stuff, she nevertheless got to explore textile techniques and materials. This is where the founding program of the Bauhaus, which aimed to unite the arts and crafts, offered a way out: “Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting . . .”, was published in April 1919, exactly two years before Annelise Fleischmann began to study at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg.“ Fortunately a leaflet came my way from the Bauhaus [on which] there was a print by Feininger, a cathedral, and I thought that was very beautiful and also at that time, through some connections—somebody told me— [that it] was a new experimental place . . . I thought, ‘That looks more like it,’ so this is what I tried.” ³¹ Maximilian Schell, Interview with Anni Albers, Orange, CT., 16 December 1989; transcript in The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archives, cited after: Asbaghi 1999, p. 155. Weber names the mediator: “A friend, Olga [sic! Redslob, daughter of Edward [sic! Edwin] Redslob––a German government official who had backed the cause of the Bauhaus, the experimental art school Walter Gropius was opening under the aegis of the Duke of Saxony in Weimar––told her about the new art school where all the crafts would be allotted equal performance, ornament cast to the wind, and function given a role of honor.” Weber 2020, p. 58. This story however lacks plausibility, since the older of the two daughters of Edwin Redslob, who was Reichskunstwart between 1920 and 1933 and a prominent supporter of the Bauhaus, was named Ottilie and not Olga, and born in 1914 (d. 2001). However, since as soon as April 1919 Gropius had the Bauhaus Manifesto with the Bauhaus program distributed throughout Germany in form of a flyer and also placed advertisements for his school in art magazines, the information may have reached Annelise Fleischmann through a different path. On the PR work of the Bauhaus see Cornelia Sohn, “Wir überleben alle Stürme”. Die Öffentlichkeitsarbeit des Bauhauses, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 1997, p. 51.] Once in Weimar, Annelise Fleischmann no longer had to show interest in biomechanics or in constructive aspects of the plant and animal world as the base of design. From the techno-material matrix of weaving, she developed her graphic geometric abstraction ³² The art-historical and art-theoretical literature on Anni Albers’ work has greatly increased in the course of the re-evaluation of weaving and, by extension, of textiles in the last two decades at least. Consequently, only one of the most recent publications on the connection between weaving and abstraction is mentioned here: Briony Fer, “Close to the Stuff the World is Made of: Weaving as a Modern Project”, in: Ann Coxon et al (ed.), Anni Albers, exhibition cat. Tate Modern, London, New Haven 2018. by means of which space was no longer decorated and interiors softly upholstered as mere “balm to the soul”. Textiles could now assume architectural functions and flexibilize space through the use of mobile room dividers.

When a new edition of the work Ein Garten ¹ The original edition was published in 1948 by Claassen & Goverts in Hamburg. was published in 2019 as part of the renowned series Naturkunden, it brought the personality and life’s work of its author, Alma de l’Aigle (1889–1959), to a contemporary audience. This extraordinary text was created under equally extraordinary circumstances: in 1944, during the freezing final winter of World War II, the teacher and reform pedagogue Alma de l’Aigle dictated her 500-page work Die ewigen Ordnungen der Erziehung: Gespräche mit Müttern (The Eternal Orders of Education: Conversations with Mothers) in an unheated room with windows without glass to a typist. In it, she vehemently opposed the educational principles propagated by the Nazis, particularly those promoted by the doctor Johanna Haarer. In parallel and quite incidentally, working in the same way, she wrote the book Ein Garten, based on her childhood memories of her parents’ landscape garden. ² Cf. Brita Reimers, “Zum allerursprünglichsten Geschehen müsste unser Geist zurückkehren . . . zum Wachstum einer Pflanze,” in: Judith Schalansky (ed.), Alma de l’Aigle: Ein Garten, Berlin 2019, p. 211. From the perspective of a growing child, she brings to life the recurring cycle of a year in the garden as an “eternal order,” which forms the key to a humane, holistic understanding of education. With her detailed description of the various vegetables and fruits growing at different intervals in the garden, including thirty different varieties of pears, the author attempts to create a counter-image to the regime’s obsession with uniformity, whose destructive impact had reached its peak at this time.

The garden in question was created by Alma’s father, the jurist Alexander de l’Aigle, on 8000 square meters of farmland in the then still rural Hamburg district of Eppendorf, as a home for his family and a place for his ideas about social reform. In his daughter’s account, he was the designer of the garden, who inspired innovations and experiments with cultivation methods. She writes candidly about her father, stating that although he had progressive ideas in political and social terms, he was conservative regarding women’s education and thus the educational prospects of his three daughters. ³ “Our father was conservative in everything concerning the family; he was an enemy of women’s education, and our desire to study was strictly rejected, as if it were something downright immoral.” Alma de l’Aigle, in: ibid., p. 168.

After training as a teacher for middle and high schools for girls from 1905 to 1909, Alma de l’Aigle, who originally wanted to become a painter, enrolled in September 1911 at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg. The fact that the school’s director Richard Meyer and teachers such as Friedrich Adler, Carl Otto Czeschka, and Richard Luksch saw nature studies as the basis of artistic and design education must have been very much to the twenty-two-year-old’s liking. The move to the new building by architect Fritz Schumacher on Lerchenfeld in October 1913, equipped with greenhouses, beds, terrariums, and animal enclosures, provided an ideal infrastructure for this ⁴ Die Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg: Jahresbericht 1913, HFBK Hamburg archive, p. 9–10 and 35–36. and occurred while Alma de l’Aigle was a student there.

Surprisingly, she did not seem to be interested in one of the artistic departments, and instead took workshop courses, mainly with the wood sculptor and industrial designer Otto Brandt, who was not part of the permanent teaching staff and taught the workshop for wood sculpture. According to the curriculum, this workshop was closely linked to the classes for sculpture, interior design, and carpentry. ⁵ Ibid., p. 56. With Otto Brandt, Alma de l’Aigle learned perspective drawing, ornamental drawing, manual skills, and (ornamental) carving, with a workload of fourteen to seventeen hours per week. In the summer semester of 1912, she also took anatomy and animal studies with the freelance teacher Hans Behrens. She did not receive credit for an anatomy course with painter Julius Wohlers in the winter semester of 1912/13 due to too many missed classes. ⁶ See student records on Alma de l’Aigle, 1911–1914, HFBK Hamburg archive. The course of her studies suggests that Alma de l’Aigle took a pragmatic approach, aiming to acquire skills and techniques that could be useful to her as a teacher, even though she only definitively decided on a teaching career in 1912. ⁷ In the winter of 1913/14 as well as in the summer of 1919, Alma de l’Aigle attended courses with the painter Arthur Siebelist, which were offered by the higher education authority as advanced training. Cf. Joachim Schnitter, Eine Ahnung kommender Lebenskunst: Lichtwarks Heidegarten und die Hittfelder Landhauskolonie, Hamburg, 2023, p. 63–64 and 225; Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Einzelne Zeichen-, Mal- und Modellkurse für Lehrerinnen und Lehrer, signature 36-2 V_563_c, vol. 1 and 2.

In Ein Garten, there is at least one passage that reveals her less sober, more bohemian attitude toward artistic education, linked to her early affinity for the youth movement: In the summer of 1914, she was allowed to organize a festival in the orchard of the estate with her “comrades from the Kunstgewerbeschule,” following a tradition of year-round garden festivals established by her father: “In the afternoon, there was a campfire in an open spot, and coffee and cake were brought in baskets to the back and served on the grass. We sang folk songs and danced folk dances, which was something romantic and revolutionary at that time. We made wreaths from meadow flowers and put them in our hair. Toward the evening, large, monochrome lanterns like yellow and red moons hung in the fruit trees. It was indeed more bacchanalian here than in the polonaise of bourgeois calm ten years earlier. It was not easy to dance on the bumpy grass, but that did not bother us; it was something entirely different from a hall in a tavern, and the old fruit trees probably did not mind.” ⁸ Alma de l’Aigle, in: Schalansky 2019, p. 124.

Alma de l’Aigle concludes this passage with the laconic sentence: “It was June 1914.” Just one month later, the bitter reality of World War I would shatter all utopias associated with the garden. With the “Lichtwark Memorial War Lunch,” ⁹ The name refers to Alfred Lichtwark, an art historian, educator, and director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, who died in January 1914., which she organized in her spare time and with part of her teacher’s salary, she clung to these ideals in her own way: In contrast to the war kitchens, the needy were not only provided with food at white-clothed tables adorned with flowers, but also with books. ¹⁰ Cf. Brita Reimers, “Zum allerursprünglichsten Geschehen müsste unser Geist zurückkehren … zum Wachstum einer Pflanze,” in: Schalansky 2019, p. 216. In the Weimar Republic, Alma de l’Aigle began to engage politically with the Young Socialists, writing speeches, essays, letters, and leaflets. From 1920, she published tirelessly, including children’s books and her correspondence with the journalist, politician, and resistance fighter Theodor Haubach, which appeared a year before the aforementioned books Die ewigen Ordnungen der Erziehung and Ein Garten. ¹¹ In an unresolved contradiction to Alma de l'Aigle's clear stance against National Socialism is her article ‘On the Jewish Question’, written in 1921 together with Frank Glatzel and published in Jungdeutsche Stimmen 3, 1921, pp. 81-86, which was clearly anti-Semitic. It needs to be clarified whether Alma de l'Aigle distanced herself from its wording in later years. Andrea Reincke is currently researching this, which can be accessed via the Geschichtswerkstatt Eppendorf. Shortly before her death, she published Begegnung mit Rosen (Encounter with Roses, 1957), a work enriched with digressions about their fragrance which goes far beyond a mere guide to the cultivation and breeding of new varieties.

Although she prioritized her journalistic and educational work throughout her life, from today’s perspective, parallels can be drawn in Alma de l’Aigle’s work to contemporary artistic approaches, such as the exploration of care work and the definition of an affective relationship between the individual and nature. A part of the garden that she transformed into a linguistic artwork with Ein Garten is preserved and can be visited as a freely accessible natural monument on the grounds of the Stiftung Anscharhöhe. ¹² Wikipedia entry in German Garten de l’Aigle, abgerufen am 2.4.2024.

Marianne Berta Amthor, born in 1898 in the small Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, began her studies at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg in the winter semester of 1913/14. During her four years as a student, she lived in her parents’ apartment on Mundsburger Damm, very close to the new building of the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, which opened in 1913. In the first two years, she took courses in nature studies and ornamental exercises, construction drawing, and lettering. At times she had a workload of fifty-one hours per week.

In Carl Otto Czeschka’s class for graphic arts and general applied arts, where she spent the last two years of her studies, she created two fashion drawings in 1915 using pencil and ink or watercolor. ¹ Box number P6S2, digitalized number 1180. The angular faces and eccentric poses that later became characteristic of Amthor’s work are already evident here. The drawings do not depict contemporary fashion: The transparent wrap over the graphically patterned, loose dress gives the figure a Biedermeier silhouette with its voluminous sleeves. Conversely, the black, deeply cut dress with tight sleeves over a white blouse with a high Stuart collar and cuffs appears ahead of its time. Combined with short hair, a bow, and a top hat, the model resembles a femme dandy or a precursor to the garçonne, which only became prominent about a decade later. From Czeschka’s class, four additional drawings of models with flared skirts in the same style have survived, although they do not bear Marianne Amthor’s name, ² Box number P6S3, digitalized number 1176.

Of interest is the Gothic-inspired architectural backdrop that Amthor created for her first drawing. The portals already hint at the monogram she later chose, featuring a gate, which appeared in slightly modified versions in her works in the following years. Reflecting her surname (whose German meaning translates to “at the gate”), the artist simplified her signature to include an M and a gate arch beneath a sometimes curved, sometimes straight roof beam. She transferred these typographic elements into the upper body and raised right arm of a figure in a 1920 drawing, dissolving into red and light brown lines. The Cubist, abstract drawing is part of an entry in the book Unsere Reklamekünstler (Our Advertising Artists), published by Verein der Plakatfreunde in 1920. In it, Amthor immortalized herself as one of only four female artists ³ Besides Amthor, these included Elisabeth von Sydow, Dore Mönkemeyer-Corty, and Käthe Wolff. with a poem next to the drawing. She succinctly tells of her connection to her adopted home of Hamburg and casts a sideways glance at the fashion capitals of her time with the lines: “One eye on Paris / One on Berlin / With my feet in Hamburg.” Then she emphasizes how she discovered her own path, asserting confidently: “I stand in bloom!” With the motto “Vivat, floreat, crescat,” she expresses her ambitions at the peak of her career.

The “eye on Paris” mentioned in the poem is most clearly reflected in a 1919 series of cards titled Kunstgewerbe und Mode (Applied Arts and Fashion) for the Hohenzollern-Kunstgewerbehaus Friedmann & Weber. ⁴ The Hohenzollern-Kunstgewerbehaus was founded in Berlin in 1879 by Hermann Hirschwald (1849–1906) and expanded to Leipziger Straße in 1888. Motivated by the reform movement in German arts and crafts, it became a department store selling items such as furniture, graphic arts, ceramics, fabrics, and leather, and was also a venue for regular special exhibitions. Cf. Ludwig Pietsch, “Das Hohenzollern-Kunstgewerbehaus – Berlin: aus Anlass seines 25-jährigen Bestehens,” in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 15, 1904/05, p. 169–176.. This venue frequently hosted exhibitions of applied arts and fashion, such as Ausstellung der neuen Frauentracht (Exhibition of New Women’s Fashion) ⁵ Cf. Valentin Scherer, “Die Ausstellung der neuen Frauentracht im Hohenzollern-Kunstgewerbehaus zu Berlin,” in: Kunstgewerbeblatt, 14, 1903, p. 75–78. in 1903 and Galerie der Moden (Gallery of Fashions) in 1912 as a historical overview of the development of fashion history ⁶ Cf. Rudolf Klein, “Zur Psychologie der Mode,” in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 31, 1912/13, p. 332–346. The series of fashion drawings, for which Amthor was apparently commissioned, is conceptually linked to modern applied arts and textiles. In some drawings the focus is less on the clothing than on various fabrics and patterns. Amthor often depicts chairs of different styles and cleverly integrates them into everyday scenes like a tennis game in the park. The flat, high-contrast drawings with bold and simultaneously elegantly curved contours demonstrate the style of Art Deco, which only reached its peak a few years later. Bright, jagged fabric patterns in vibrant colors recall Parisian fashion illustrator George Barbier. Like Paul Iribe and Georges Lepape for fashion designer Paul Poiret, Barbier designed entire portfolios using the pochoir printing technique. ⁷ Cf. for example “Les Robes de Paul Poiret racontées par Paul Iribe”. This collaboration is generally considered the starting point for the elevation of fashion drawing to an art form, rather than merely a realistic depiction of clothing and thus more of an infographic. The commonality among these French fashion illustrators and Amthor lies in the use of figures viewed from behind, but particularly in their interest in the free stylization of the figures and innovative fabric patterns. Amthor may have found inspiration in the fabric department of the Wiener Werkstätte, which opened in 1910, and in the ethnographic collection of Hamburg’s Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Ethnology, now MARKK), located very close to her later residence on Binderstraße.

The fact that Amthor also used her fashion figures in commercial graphics is demonstrated by works from the period between 1919 and 1922. In 1921, the magazine Das Plakat featured her invitation cards, posters, and drawings in a special issue on Hamburg. ⁸ Das Plakat, 7/8, July/August 1921. If her great talent in the field of fashion “did not have to struggle so hard for recognition,” the magazine wrote about Amthor, she would be among the “best fashion artists.” ⁹ Ibid., p. 390. These graphic works demonstrate Amthor’s significance in the artistic milieu of Hamburg and beyond: She not only drew for the Berliner Modewoche (Berlin Fashion Week) but also designed the invitation for a lecture by the director of the Kunstbibliothek der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, Peter Jessen.

In 1922, Marianne Amthor married the graphic artist Hans Schubel, five years her senior, who had also attended the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg beginning in 1908. Since, in his last semester in 1914/15, after studying commercial graphics, photography, and typography, like Amthor he was a student in Czeschka’s class, it is assumed that the two met there. During the 1920s, the couple lived and worked at Binderstraße 24 in the Grindel district, where they maintained their joint studio for poster painting. ¹⁰ Cf. advertisement in a Hamburg directory. A letterhead designed by Schubel and an invitation to an event in Berlin designed by Amthor from 1919 show a striking similarity in typography. The letters A + S and ASA for Atelier Schubel Amthor at the bottom of the invitation indicate a collaboration between the two since at least 1919.

In the autumn of 1937, Schubel emigrated to Buenos Aires; the exact circumstances are not known. His wife followed him in the spring of 1938. ¹¹ Staatsarchiv Hamburg, signature 314-15_FVg 3087. The records of the Oberfinanzpräsidium contain correspondence from 1938/39 regarding the donation or repayment of approximately sixty-five Reichsmarks from Marianne Schubel to her brother Fritz. It is peculiar that the “questionnaire for emigrants” for Marianne Schubel had to be filled out by her brother in three slightly different versions. Another form, filled out in two variants by an official, addressed Schubel—contrary to her brother’s entries in the questionnaire—as a Jew. This was clearly a form designed to deprive Jewish emigrants of their savings. That year, more than 10,000 Germans emigrated to Argentina. ¹² Anne Saint Sauveur-Henn, “Die deutsche Migration nach Argentinien (1870–1945),” in: Peter Birle (ed.), Die Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Argentinien, Frankfurt am Main, 2010, p. 21–52, here p. 25. The extent to which this is true and what works she created in exile could be the subject of further research. ¹³ Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Signatur 314-15_FVg 3087. Inwiefern das zutrifft und welche Arbeiten im Exil entstanden, wäre Gegenstand weiterer Forschungen.

Works by Ruth Bess, whose real name was Ruth Bessoudo Courvoisier, are shown in renowned museums and galleries across North and South America, from New York and Washington, D.C. to San Felipe in Venezuela and São Paulo. Beginning with graphic design, she developed an increasingly free approach to graphic techniques and a distinctive, rich visual language throughout various phases and stages of her life. Her work reflects “the dreamy vision of a fantastical world where flowers and animals coexist harmoniously. . . . The fantastical is brought to life and conveys a sense of peace and joy. . . . Yet these pictures, which appear to emerge from great spontaneity, are in reality the product of patient, slow work in which the artist skillfully translates her inner landscape onto copper,” according to the exhibition booklet of her 1990 retrospective in Caracas. ¹ Bookletfrom Ruth Bessoudo’s solo exhibition los armadillos, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1990, accessed: 5 March 2024.

Ruth Bessoudo was born on 14 July 1914 in Lübeck, the daughter of actress Clara Böhm and Haïm Isaac Bessoudo, who came from Istanbul. ² Unless otherwise noted, this text is based on the extensive information in the blog, last accessed: 5 March 2024 Bessoudo was one of the first Jews from the Ottoman Empire to settle in Germany toward the end of the nineteenth century, primarily in Berlin and Hamburg. In 1894, his trading company opened at Alsterdamm 14 (now Ballindamm), becoming one of the most prestigious importers of oriental carpets.

Bessoudo exemplifies the first generation of Turkish-Jewish immigrants in Europe: From Paris to Brussels, Milan, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Berlin, carpet dealers occupied prominent positions among the first Turkish-Sephardic Jews ³ Cf. Corry Guttstadt, Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust, Berlin/Hamburg, 2008, p. 109–156; Corry Guttstadt, “Sepharden auf Wanderschaft: Vom Bosporus an die Spree, Elbe und Isar,” in: PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien, 19, 2013, p. 89–112; Isaak Behar, Versprich mir, dass du am Leben bleibst, Munich, 2002, p. 38–40. As a Sephardic Jew, Haïm Isaac Bessoudo was a member of Hamburg’s Portuguese-Jewish community and served in 1918 as chairman of the short-lived Osmanische Vereinigung (Ottoman Association) in Hamburg. ⁴ Cf. Yavuz Köse, Osmanen in Hamburg: Eine Beziehungsgeschichte zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges, Hamburg, 2016, p. 125. Clara Böhm performed under the stage names Ariste Parnos and Clara Kollendt.

In September 1932, Ruth Bessoudo enrolled at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg. According to her registration, she had already taken private painting lessons for the previous three years. In the 1932/33 winter semester, she attended the introductory class by Fritz Schleifer and studied calligraphy with Hugo Meier-Thur and nature studies with Karl Lang, who was later dismissed by the Nazis, and then with Rudolf Neugebauer in the summer semester.

The Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933 immediately impacted the teaching staff at the newly renamed Hansische Hochschule für Bildende Künste; Director Max Sauerlandt and other progressive professors and lecturers were dismissed. It is assumed that Ruth Bessoudo left the school after only two semesters due to this situation and went to Denmark to continue her art studies at the Kunsthåndværkerskolen in Copenhagen, where she graduated in 1935.

After a brief stay with her family in Hamburg, Ruth Bessoudo went to Paris to learn poster design from the celebrated French graphic artist Paul Colin. During her studies there (1935/36), she witnessed the antifascist mobilization sparked by a failed right-wing coup attempt that led to the Front populaire (Popular Front) coming to power in 1936. There she also met her future husband, Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier, a left-wing intellectual working as a journalist, who was originally from Bulgaria.

In 1939, Ruth Bessoudo returned to Germany to be with her family, who were increasingly subjected to antisemitic persecution. The Spanish citizenship Haïm Isaac Bessoudo had acquired in 1924 initially provided some protection. Foreign Jews were exempted from “Aryanization” and the punitive payments demanded after the November pogroms, due to concerns over the Reich’s foreign policy. However, at the end of 1938, the Nazi authorities tried to confiscate her father’s business through a fabricated criminal case. Under this pressure, Haïm Isaac Bessoudo emigrated to Spain in 1939. ⁵ Details about this and Haïm Isaac Bessoudo’s emigration can be reconstructed from the files of the compensation proceedings initiated by his wife and daughters after the war (Staatsarchiv Hamburg: 351-11_44070; 213-13_8700 and 621-1/87_77, the latter concerning the forced closure of his business). However, Spain generally did not allow Jewish citizens to remain in the country and deported them to Spanish Morocco ⁶ For context: Bernd Rother, Spanien und der Holocaust, Tübingen, 2001, p. 244–250., where Haïm Isaac Bessoudo died penniless in January 1942.

Classified as a “half-Jew” by the Nazi legislation, Ruth Bessoudo was prohibited from working as a graphic artist by order of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda). Thus, she worked from 1940 to 1944 as a secretary for an advertising company in Hamburg. After the liberation in 1945, she was again permitted to work in her profession and was active as a graphic artist and illustrator in Hamburg until 1951. ⁷ Entry in Leitfaden für Presse und Werbung, Essen, 1951, p. 568; Ludwig Fischer, Klaas Jarchow, Horst Ohde, Hans-Gerd Winter (eds.), Dann waren die Sieger da: Studien zur literarischen Kultur in Hamburg 1945–1950 (Schriftenreihe der Hamburgischen Kulturstiftung), Hamburg, 1999, p. 351 and 170. During this period, she illustrated works including the children’s book Hallo Frosch by Werner Demuth (1948) and Maske und Schminke by Richard Ohnsorg (1949), and worked for the office of the United States High Commissioner for Germany.

During the German occupation, Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier joined the Resistance and had close ties with many left-wing intellectuals, including the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In 1947, he emigrated to Caracas, Venezuela, where he became a film expert, organized film festivals, and founded a magazine. Ruth Bessoudo followed him in 1951 and worked as an illustrator for his articles. In 1955, when Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier took on the role of representative for Unifrance in Latin America, a semi-governmental organization promoting French cinema abroad, Ruth Bessoudo accompanied him to film festivals around the world. The couple established connections and friendships with many internationally renowned actors, directors, and artists. They developed a particularly close friendship with Luis Buñuel. ⁸ Ruth Bessoudo and Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier’s autograph book includes signed photos of Alain Delon, Alec Guinness, Charles Aznavour, Gary Cooper, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Jean-Paul Belmondo, among others.

In 1960, Unifrance moved its Latin American office to Rio de Janeiro, leading Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier and Ruth Bessoudo to relocate there. In Brazil, the writer Jorge Amado encouraged her to learn copper engraving and introduced her to artist Roberto de Lamonica, who worked at the newly opened Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio. ⁹ Cf. introduction to the joint publication by Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier and Ruth Bessoudo, Jacaré solitaire (The Lonely Alligator), Paris, 1979, with poems by Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier and illustrations (engravings) by Ruth Bessoudo. The museum’s printmaking studio was set up by the artist Johnny Friedlaender at the initiative of UNESCO. He was also from Germany, imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1933, and emigrated after his release. Ruth Bessoudo studied and worked in this studio between 1964 and 1969, eventually specializing in aquatint.

In her etchings, she explored the fauna and flora of South America, with her favorite subjects being the tapir and armadillo. The international reputation of the printmaking studio in Rio enabled Ruth Bessoudo to exhibit for the first time at the ninth São Paulo Biennale in 1967. In 1969, she left the museum studio and became an independent artist. From 1967 to 1990, her color etchings were exhibited at exhibitions and biennales around the world.

Shortly after the couple returned to Paris, Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier died in 1984, prompting Ruth Bessoudo to return to Caracas, where she had many friends and connections in the art scene. Her solo exhibition los armadillos at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1990 was a tribute to her artistic work. Shortly afterward, she moved back to Paris and remained artistically active for the next fifteen years, traveling and presenting her etchings at several exhibitions in France and throughout Europe. She spent the last ten years of her life, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, at the Vaugirard Hospital in Paris, where she died on 19 May 2015, at the age of 100.

The first stage of her artistic training took Elise Margot Paula Rudolphina Hulda Schlie, known as Elise Schlie, to Berlin. After graduating high school in Hamburg, the daughter from a wealthy Prussian family born in Parchim, Mecklenburg, arrived in Berlin in October 1916, amidst World War I. Despite the war, the capital remained a hub of the international avant-garde. The nineteen-year-old was particularly drawn to the circle around Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm and the magazine of the same name. ¹ Cf. Sally Quin, Bauhaus on the Swan: Elise Blumann, an émigré artist in Western Australia, 1938–1948, Crawley, 2015, p. 4. There, she saw exhibitions by Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Kurt Schwitters. Through the gallery, she also came into contact with intellectual circles around the leftist magazine Die Aktion, to which prominent artists contributed graphics. Since the Königliche Akademie der Künste (from 1918 on known as the Akademie der Künste) did not admit women as students before 1919, ² In the same year, Käthe Kollwitz was appointed as the first female professor at the academy, and in 1920, Max Liebermann took over as director. Schlie’s options were limited to classes at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, the art school of the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen und Kunstfreundinnen (Berlin Association for Women Artists and Art Enthusiasts), which only admitted women, and the Königliche Kunstschule (from 1918 on known as the Staatliche Kunstschule zu Berlin). She opted for the Königliche Kunstschule. There, she earned her diploma as a certified drawing teacher in June 1919, while demonstrations and bloody confrontations raged through the streets of Berlin. The artist witnessed the post-war chaos and the beginnings of the Weimar Republic, attending political meetings organized by Die Aktion. The reasons for her eventual departure from Berlin are unclear. What is certain is that she spent the most intense years of her training in Hamburg.

In September 1919, Elise Schlie began her studies at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg, initially enrolling in evening classes, then starting a full-time intensive course of forty-four hours a week in November. She mainly studied painting under Arthur Illies. ³ SSee student file on Elise Schlie, HFBK Hamburg archive. She shared a studio with Virgil Popp, who also studied painting at Lerchenfeld, and worked obsessively during this period, determined to establish herself as an artist. In her diary on 5 October 1919 she wrote: “Three weeks I have been in Hamburg. This week, I worked as hard as a person can . . . and in the evening the study from the nude, this wonderful male nude. I was still a child in Berlin up until my exams. Now I do what the teachers want me to do. Then I didn’t. For the first time in my life, I work conscientiously: will it lead me to my aim?” ⁴ Carolyn Polizzotto, Approaching Elise, Perth, 1988, p. 102, quoted from Quin 2015, p. 11.

In November 1920, this particularly productive phase abruptly ended as the Schlie family , like many others, faced financial difficulties due to the aftermath of the First World War. Schlie was forced to earn her living as a drawing teacher. She worked as a kind of governess for an Italian family in Turin, taught art and gymnastics at a girls’ school near Kassel, and eventually became a teacher at a school in Eutin. Although a passionate teacher, Schlie suffered from the forced interruption of her studies. In 1921, the twenty-four-year-old wrote: “My feet have been made for a path strewn with buds; and instead this path rips and tears and hurts.” ⁵ Ibid., p. 113, quoted from Quin 2015, p. 13. She returned to Lerchenfeld in 1922. Alongside painting, still under Arthur Illies, she also studied typography with Hugo Meier-Thur and lithography with Eduard Winkler, until her life took another turn in 1923, when she married the chemist Arnold Blumann, twelve years her senior, who supported his wife’s ambitions. He was a well-known specialist in the industrial extraction of essential oils, and so the couple lived without financial worries even during the years of inflation. Elise had a studio in the attic of their house at Holbeinstraße 2 in the Groß Flottbek district of Hamburg. However, with the birth of their sons Charles (1924), Hans (1928), and Nils (1934), her artistic work was not unimpeded during these years. 1933 was a pivotal year for the Blumanns with the death of their second son Hans and the Nazis’ rise to power. Arnold’s Jewish background and political reasons made staying in Germany untenable. In September 1934, immediately after the birth of their third son, Elise followed her husband and eldest son to the Netherlands. During the following “years of wandering,” as Elise Blumann later described them, she created only a few paintings. After a year in the Netherlands and two years in England, the family, foreseeing the increasing threat of war, decided to leave Europe. On 4 January 1938, the Blumanns arrived in Australia aboard the passenger ship Ormonde and settled in Nedlands near Perth, where Arnold had taken up a managerial position at a manufacturer of fragrances and flavorings derived from eucalyptus oil.

During the first year after their arrival, Elise Blumann dealt primarily with practical matters. She was responsible for purchasing a plot of land and building a house. She also designed the furniture, partly assisted by her son Charles. It was not until 1939 that she began to paint intensively again, using painting as a medium to explore and make use of her new surroundings. She painted portraits of her sons and their new friends, such as the sister and wife of the architect Harold Krantz, who designed the Blumanns’ house. The overwhelming and initially unfamiliar landscape, which surrounded Elise’s studio on three sides, appeared in these portraits as a background, rendered with a few strokes and clear forms. The artist had to adjust to the completely different light conditions. In a 1946 interview, she mentioned having to acquire not only different paints and brushes but also a completely different style of painting. ⁶ The Australian Women’s Weekly, 10 August 1946, p. 18, quoted from Quin 2015, p. 39. Summer Nude (1939), ), now her most famous painting and located at the University of Western Australia, dates from this period. It depicts Marianne Korwill, who had arrived in Perth with her husband and young daughter from Austria only a few months after the Blumanns. The then twenty-eight-year-old Marianne leans naked, her forearms resting on the balcony railing of the Blumanns’ home. Her body blends both formally and chromatically with the shadowless landscape that opens behind her. Only the towel, painted in a vibrant orange and draped over the railing, stands out. It frames Marianne’s lower body as she holds her hands relaxed over her belly and groin. The posture and overall composition exude confidence and natural presence. For the first time, Elise Blumann combines the formal language of European modernism, which she encountered as a young artist in Germany, with the vividness and energy of the Australian landscape. This creates an impression of having arrived in the new environment, a feeling that also extends to the depicted friend, who, like Elise, came to Australia as a refugee and with whom Elise especially shared artistic exchanges. “Marianne has such a fine and astonishingly certain sense for drawing and painting. I keep inviting her ‘to finish my pictures.’ She’s almost always right in her criticism. I love her as a person. She is a fine gift.” ⁷ Elise Blumann, journal entry from 12 May 1939, quoted from Quin 2015, p. 39.

It was not until 1944 that Elise Blumann, under the name Elise Burleigh, had her first exhibition in Australia, at Newspaper House in Perth. Another solo show followed in 1948 at the same venue. During this period, she also had solo exhibitions at the Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne. These were again productive and busy years. In a series with paintings of dancers bearing symbolic titles like Surge (1943/44), Rebirth (1944), Spring (1943), and Youth (1943/44), Blumann once again devoted herself to the female nude, reconnecting with her engagement with expressive dance from the 1920s. ⁸ During her studies in Hamburg, she met the expressive dancer Lavinia Schulz again, whom she had previously met in Berlin. Schulz worked closely with Lothar Schreyer, whose “Kampfbühne” performed in the auditorium of the Kunstgewerbeschule between 1919 and 1921. Cf. Christian Weller, “Abstraktion und Mystik: Lothar Schreyers ‘Kampfbühne’ zu Gast am Lerchenfeld,” in: Hartmut Frank (ed.), Nordlicht, 222 Jahre: Die Hamburger Hochschule für bildende Künste am Lerchenfeld und ihre Vorgeschichte, Hamburg, 1989. While landscapes had previously served mainly as backgrounds in portraits, she developed them into an independent subject in the 1940s. A recurring motif was the Melaleuca, an Australian species of tea tree that characterizes the area around the Swan River. Its gnarled branches make these trees look dramatic, especially during the frequent storms in the area at that time.

When the family purchased a vacation home in Gooseberry Hill in 1945, Elise Blumann discovered the vegetation of the Australian bush. Her paintings depict the plants in the undergrowth from a low perspective and often from close range, eschewing details and becoming increasingly abstract. During trips to the outback with a friend in the mid-1940s, the artist became acquainted with the impoverished mining settlements of the First Nations people. She processed her impressions in portraits that capture the harsh living conditions without sacrificing the painterly, poetic dimension. During these years, she also worked as an art therapist for traumatized veterans in the neurological ward of the Nedlands Repatriation General Hospital and gave drawing and painting lessons for adults and children at her home. When she left for an extended stay in Germany in 1949, she was well integrated into the art scene of Perth, which was composed of emigrants and local artists returning after the war, including as part of the group she co-founded, the Banana Club.

Sally Quin, curator of the art collection at the UWA, emphasizes in her monograph on Elise Blumann how it was during her emigration that she found her artistic position and simultaneously made a significant contribution to the continent’s visual culture through the modernist ideas about painting that she encountered in her European education, which were initially perceived as breaks with tradition. This is owed in no small part to the keen senses of a person arriving in a new environment and wanting to interpret it for herself. ⁹ Quin 2015, p. 118.

The artistic work of the sculptor Jutta Bossard-Krull is usually viewed in connection with the reformist, Expressionist oeuvre of her husband Johann Michael Bossard (1874–1950), a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist from Switzerland, who created his Kunststätte (Art Site) on a property in the Lüneburg Heath from 1911 to 1950. ¹ Cf. Magdalena Schulz-Ohm, Vom Künstlerhaus zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Eine exemplarische Untersuchung von Johann Michael Bossards expressionistischer Kunststätte, dissertation, Hamburg, typed, 2 volumes, 2017. After marrying her teacher, who was twenty-nine years her senior, in 1926, Bossard-Krull assisted with the artistic design of this complex. Other (former) students, family members, and friends also took on various roles. ² Franz Hötterges (1912–1993), a student of Bossard, lived and worked from 1932 to around 1936 at the Kunststätte. Gudula Mayr suspects that Bossard’s former student Alwin Blaue was also involved in the ceramics for the Kunsttempel. Cf. Gudula Mayr, Johann Michael Bossard: Kleinplastiken (Schriften der Kunststätte Bossard, 9), Jesteburg, 2010, p. 33. Other helpers are documented in written memoirs and historical photographs. However, the attribution of individual artists’ contributions was not intended. ³ This can be inferred from statements by Jutta Bossard-Krull, for example, in Susanne Harth, Frauen am Lerchenfeld: Ein exemplarischer Rückblick auf Leben und Werk von Lehrerinnen und Schülerinnen an der Hamburger Kunsthochschule, unpublished dissertation, HFBK Hamburg, Department of Architecture, Hamburg, 1988, p. 56: “. . . inspired by the shared goal and immersed in the common task, they both worked on an object together without the need for any arrangement.” Bossard-Krull’s work extends far beyond merely collaborating on the Kunststätte. Throughout her life, she diminished her own contribution by either not discussing it or only vaguely addressing it. Nearly thirty years after her death, however, it is possible to take a nuanced look at her work, career, and motivations.

Jutta Bossard-Krull was born on 6 July 1903 in Buxtehude as Carla Augusta Elsine Dorothea Krull. ⁴ Jutta Krull’s commonly used name was Augusta, but the name Jutta became established early on and was noted in her identity card in 1923. She was the sixth and last child of the secondary-school teacher Ernst Krull and his wife Auguste. The parents enabled all five daughters to attend a high school for girls and pursue a profession. Their only son, Ernst Krull, had fallen in World War I. From a young age, Jutta Krull developed a critical attitude toward traditional gender roles of women, influenced by contemporary philosophy and literature. During a hospital stay in 1972, she wrote retrospectively: “I had read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Weininger earlier. I was disappointed to be born a girl and could only bitterly defend myself when many young men liked to cite this literature and loudly label a woman at the expense of the literature.” ⁵ Handwritten notes by Jutta Bossard-Krull, Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 113).

Thus, she did not choose one of the typical female professions of the time, and instead, following her inclination, opted for an artistic career. She was interested in “drawing, but even more so in working with materials, everything that involves manual skills.” ⁶ Harth 1988, p. 52.
Jutta Krull’s first career aspiration was to become a ceramicist. She began her studies at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg in the ceramics department under Max Wünsche in the summer semester of 1922, and in 1923 she began taking supplementary lessons with Johann Bossard, switching after six semesters to his sculpture class, which she then attended for another nine semesters as a full-time student until the summer semester of 1929. In the winter semester of 1927/28, she also took a course in nude drawing with Willy Habl, and attended required classes by the art historian Wilhelm Niemeyer in literature and art history, as well as anatomy lessons.

A possible reason for this change of major could have been her inclination for freely forming materials, as evidenced by her habit of manually altering simple vessels thrown on the potter’s wheel into sculptures. ⁷ Ibid. Additionally, she had a key experience in 1924: At the exhibition organized by Max Sauerlandt at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe for Johann Bossard’s fiftieth birthday, she saw her teacher’s work for the first time. He taught in a purely academic manner, always polite but distant, revealing nothing about himself or his art. “The exhibition gripped me at the root of my psychological existence,” she later said of this event, “yet at twenty-one, I felt too insignificant to express myself to Bossard in such a manner.” ⁸ Handwritten notes by Jutta Bossard-Krull, Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 111). In the introductory speech, Bossard explained his art-theoretical approach about the nature of colors, developing art as an “echo of cosmic life” and defining the relationship between color and line, between sensation and the intellectual, as dualistic. ⁹ Typewritten text, Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 106).

From then on, the young woman increasingly oriented herself toward her teacher, as indicated by her change of major. During her short stays in the Lüneburg Heath (Johann Bossard invited his students there once or twice a year), she was able to witness the beginnings of the artistic design of the estate. There Bossard realized his vision of the reunification of the arts into a total work of art as expressed by Richard Wagner. It would ultimately combine architecture, architectural sculpture, painting, miniature and large-scale sculpture, relief, textile art, mosaic, stained glass, and garden design. ¹⁰ Cf. Gudula Mayr, “Johann Michael Bossard und sein Gesamtkunstwerk in der Nordheide,” in: Kreiskalender 2012, Hamburg, 2012, p. 7–22.

As an art student, Jutta Krull was somewhat of a loner. She did not participate in the major artist festivals at the Curiohaus, instead focusing entirely on her work. ¹¹ Cf. Harth 1988, p. 53; Oliver Fok, Jutta Bossard. Ein Leben voller Kunst. Mit Erinnerungen an Jutta Bossard von Harald Wohlthat (Schriften der Kunststätte Bossard, 2; Schriften des Freilichtmuseums am Kiekeberg, 44), Ehestorf 2003, p. 18. She had close contact with only a few fellow students, including Alwine Fülscher from Winterthur, Switzerland. ¹² Jutta Bossard-Krull also mentions Alice Müller, actually Alice Hertha Müller. According to her student records, she primarily attended drawing courses from 1917 to 1919 and in 1924/25. She was deported to a concentration camp by the Nazis due to her Jewish heritage, which she survived. Fülscher attended the Kunstgewerbeschule from 1918 to 1923, and studied sculpture under Johann Bossard from 1921 to 1923. ¹³ VCf. student records on Alwine Fülscher, HFBK Hamburg archive. After Alwine Fülscher returned to Switzerland in 1923, the women maintained an intense correspondence for years. ¹⁴ Their correspondence extends from 1923 to 1946, Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 099). In 1979, Jutta Bossard-Krull noted: “Particularly valuable friendship with Alwine Füllscher [sic], a Bossard student and painter as well: significant disposition + strong will toward emotional + intellectual values; a tendency toward solitude as a source of strength . . . stimulating + important; .. . .” ¹⁵ Handwritten notes by Jutta Bossard-Krull, Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 211). Alwine Fülscher also provided assistance—likely for the bronze Mutter mit Kind—in drawing the proportions and posture. ¹⁶ Cf. letter from Alwine Fülscher to Jutta Krull (undated), Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 099). The life-sized grave statue is the most important work from her time as a student and the first commissioned work by Jutta Krull, for the merchant Ernst Hube from Bremervörde. ¹⁷ The statue measures 150 cm, the pedestal 40 cm. The bronze depicts a standing woman with a stylized floor-length cloak. In her arms she holds a child that seems to seamlessly separate from the silhouette of the mother yet remains one with her. The group of figures still stands today at the Neuenfelder Cemetery in Bremervörde. The HFBK Hamburg archive includes a historical photograph of the grave statue. Ernst Hube’s dates of birth and death are not known. She herself described the sculpture as her final project. It was displayed at the Kunstgewerbeschule before its delivery and was recognized as “outstanding” ¹⁸ Handwritten notes by Jutta Bossard-Krull, Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 147). by Wilhelm Niemeyer.

A planned trip to Paris following her studies did not materialize: unexpectedly, Johann Bossard proposed marriage to his student, which led Jutta Krull to change her future plans. On the day of their engagement, he gave her his promotional publication for the upcoming temple construction, the planned centerpiece of the estate, to read. With this gesture, he initiated her into his plans for the total work of art.

In a letter to his future father-in-law, Johann Bossard portrayed the significant age difference as a minor matter, emphasizing the benefit for the young woman: “One reason of external nature, among others, is that a union with your daughter will offer her more assurance for her further artistic development than would likely be the case under current conditions, and we both consider this very important. Imagine your daughter as Hebe, who helps to beautify and ease the last efforts of the path for the aging, work-loving man . . . . We do not speak of the depth of our mutual inclination; it is our most intimate certainty.” ¹⁹ Letter from Johann Bossard to Ernst Krull (undated), Kunststätte Bossard archive (AJB 108).

With Jutta Bossard-Krull, the artist had brought one of his most qualified students to the Lüneburg Heath in 1926. This is evidenced by her diploma, issued only in 1938, with almost consistently top grades. In it, Johann Bossard praises, among other things, the “imaginative works of miniature sculpture” and the “conscientious formal qualities as well as depth of feeling”; Max Wünsche writes: “Her works have always been pleasing and attest to talent and skill.” ²⁰ Report in the student records for Jutta Bossard-Krull from 26 November 1938, HFBK Hamburg archive.

Jutta Bossard-Krull’s artistic work can be divided into three areas, with some works dated between 1926 and 1929 not only created at the Kunststätte but also likely during her time at the Kunstgewerbeschule. These include the ceramics at the Kunsttempel (Art Temple), the floors in the temple and the Eddasaal (Edda Hall), the carved arch of the Gudruntor (Gudrun Gate), and three small nude figures in bronze intended for it. Some of the carved wooden figures in the gallery in the Eddasaal were also probably made by Jutta Bossard-Krull. The work Kerzenleuchter in Drachenform, consisting of two wooden candlesticks in dragon form, which matched the room’s theme of Nordic mythology, was also a collaborative effort, as were five life-sized wooden figures based on a sketch and plaster models by Johann Bossard, as well as the garden.

Furthermore, there are individual works by Bossard-Krull with thematic and genre-spanning references to the main themes of the Kunststätte: the eternal cycle of becoming and passing away and Bossard’s dualistic worldview. These primarily include ceramic works. In some cases, Bossard-Krull was inspired by her husband’s works, such as two candlesticks that, through the clear connection between figurative form and practical function, recall his works. However, she only adopted the idea and found her own solutions: In the case of Großer Leuchter in Form eines Kopfes (Large Candlestick in the Form of a Head), she transformed this practical object into a sculpture and augmented it by painting figurative scenes on both sides, adding another genre of art: painting. ²¹ Cf. Mayr 2012, p. 49f. The prevailing artistic trends at the Kunstgewerbeschule at the time also served as a source of inspiration. Experiments with form and glaze from the Expressionist 1920s ²² Cf. Hermann Jedding, „Porzellanschöpfungen von Hamburger Bildhauern“, in: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 21, 1976, p. 192f. are also reflected in Bossard-Krull’s works, such as the aforementioned candlestick. Some ceramics bear the signatures “JBK” or “JKB,” which strongly resemble those of her husband. ²³ With the similarity of the signatures, Jutta Bossard-Krull indirectly referred to her works, which harmonized with her husband’s. Only upon inquiry, for example during her tours of the Kunststätte, did she explain which works were hers. Cf. Fok 2003, p. 32.
Textile works by Jutta Bossard-Krull also belong to the overall artistic design, including carpets, chair cushions, blankets, and pillow covers. Especially the surviving pillow covers fit into the context of the works from the workshop for textile art at Lerchenfeld, led by Maria Brinckmann. ²⁴ Cf. Maria Brinckmann, “Arbeiten der Werkstätte für Textilkunst,” in: Richard Meyer (ed.), Werkstattbericht der Staatlichen Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg, vol. 1, Hamburg, 1924.

In addition, there are independent works unrelated to the Kunststätte. These include portrait busts that Bossard-Krull made during her husband’s lifetime and after his death. Most of the models came from the immediate vicinity—acquaintances, friends, or relatives. This is the case, for example, with busts of Bossard’s patrons Helmuth Wohlthat and Theo Offergeld. The surviving sculpturally modeled, naturalistic portraits at the Kunststätte are made of plaster and are colorfully painted, with the exception of a bronze portrait of Johann Bossard, created in the last years of the artist’s life.

After his death in 1950, Jutta Bossard-Krull devoted much time and effort to preserving and making the couple’s joint life’s work accessible to the public. In doing so, it drew in part on people and networks that continued to spread right-wing extremist, nationalist ideas after 1945, as a study published in spring 2024 by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte on behalf of the Stiftung Kunststätte Johann und Jutta Bossard shows. ²⁵ Tobias Hof, Weiterführendes Gutachten zur Geschichte der Kunststätte Bossard zum Leben und Werk des Künstlerehepaars Johann Michael Bossard und Jutta Bossard, Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Hg.), Hamburg-München 2024, p. 144-241. In 1958, she participated in a competition for a memorial in her birthplace of Buxtehude. Her design, in the form of a crystalline two-tongued flame, was not executed, but the artist received a prize of 500 marks. She increasingly took on commissions for busts, the proceeds of which she used for the maintenance of the Kunststätte. Particularly five bronze heads and a bronze relief of medical directors and chief physicians of the hospital in Harburg and the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf brought her additional income in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These are among the few artworks by Bossard-Krull that have found their way into a (semi-)public space and can still be seen there today. ²⁶ The busts are located at the Erika-Haus of the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf; the bronze relief of Prof. Dr. Hugo Schottmüller in the Medizinhistorisches Museum Hamburg; the bronzes of Dr. Erwin König and Prof. Dr. Friedrich Lichtenauer, along with another portrait of Prof. Dr. Budelmann, are at the Asklepios Klinikum Harburg. Jutta Bossard-Krull mentioned only the Budelmann bust for the hospital in Harburg in her handwritten notes.

To Jutta Bossard-Krull, her work Die Träumende (The Dreaming Woman) from 1931 was her most important sculpture. She executed three different versions in different materials for the site in Jesteburg-Lüllau. However, her principal work is the preservation of the Kunststätte in its original condition for posterity. ²⁷ After several failed attempts, Jutta Bossard-Krull succeeded in 1995, a year before her death, in transforming the Kunststätte into a private foundation. Since 1997, the Kunststätte Bossard has been a museum.

Maria Josefa Deodata, known as Maya Chrusecz, ¹ The surname appears in secondary literature in various spellings. The form used here follows the student file from the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule and the listing of her father Georg Chrusecz in the Hamburg directory from 1908. In other official documents such as the Hamburg birth register and the registration card from the city of Zurich, it is spelled Chruszcz. the eldest daughter of a decorative painter from Hamburg, began her studies in the winter semester of 1908/09 at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in her hometown, which began admitting women in 1907. She enrolled in courses on modeling with the sculptor Ludolf Albrecht, nature studies and design with the graphic artist and painter Paul Helms, and compass drawing with Otto Brandt, whose specialty was wood sculpture. ² Student file for Maya Chrusecz, HFBK Hamburg archive. On the history of the school, cf. Hartmut Frank (ed.), Nordlicht, 222 Jahre: Die Hamburger Hochschule für bildende Künste am Lerchenfeld und ihre Vorgeschichte, Hamburg, 1989. Initially, women were only admitted to workshops for book design, precious metal techniques, and modeling. In October 1909, when the textile artist Maria Brinckmann started teaching as the first female instructor in the newly established workshop for artistic embroidery, Maya Chrusecz was among her students. In the previous summer semester, she had continued her training with Albrecht, learned projection drawing from Brandt, and under Helms she took a wide-ranging course on nature studies followed by lessons on drawing plants and design. As in the first school year, it was especially the courses with Helms that she attended regularly and in which she earned good grades. In the winter semester of 1909/10, she also registered for a class on metalworking techniques with the goldsmith Alexander Schönauer, but her report card notes numerous absences, resulting in some instructors being unable to provide evaluations. This continued in the summer semester of 1910. With Schönauer, she focused on chiseling and expanded her schedule to include human and animal anatomy with the zoologist Alexander Sokolovsky. Overall, she was so seldom present that only the latter assessed her performance. In her final school year, 1910/11, she concentrated on animal anatomy, chiseling, as well as compass and projection drawing with the sculptor Friedrich Rampendahl, and figure drawing with the painter Arthur Illies.

How Maya Chrusecz spent her time immediately after she attended the Kunstgewerbeschule is not known. In July 1913, she registered in Munich a business as “artistic workshops for the production of jewelry, women’s clothing, miscellaneous items, and household utensils,” ³ Registration card, Stadtarchiv München and was also listed in the city directory under this business. Her focus on jewelry and house-hold utensils reflects her training in the metal workshop. Her workshops in Munich seem to have been only modestly successful, as she left the city at the end of July 1914. In October 1916, she moved to Zurich and registered her profession as an arts and crafts teacher. ⁴ Registration card, Stadtarchiv Zürich. She lived at Seegartenstrasse 2 in a space belonging to Rudolf von Laban’s Schule für Bewegungskunst. These accommodations were likely arranged for her by the Hamburg dancer Katja Wulff, who had been studying and teaching there since autumn 1916. Chrusecz also worked for Laban’s school, and the program from the evening of final presentations on 27 June 1917 mentions her as a member of the Formabteilung (form department) responsible for the design of performance spaces and costumes. ⁵ Brochure for Laban’s school from 27 June 1917, Tanzarchiv Köln, estate of Katja Wulff. In addition to Chrusecz, the department included Laban, Wulff, Sophie Taeuber, and the Hamburg artisan Elisabeth von Ruckteschell. No evidence exists of Chrusecz participating as a dancer in the school’s events. Katja Wulff wrote in a 1918 letter to her family about a course that Chrusecz likely held in the context of the Formabteilung at Laban’s school. ⁶ Letter from Katja Wulff to her family, 12 May 1918, in: Evelyn Dörr, Also, die Damen voran! Rudolf Laban in Briefen an Tänzer, Choreographen und Tanzpädagogen, vol. 1, 1912–1918, Norderstedt, 2013, p. 297. However, in his Chronique zurichoise, Tristan Tzara names her alongside Jeanne Rigaud as a participant in the Danse Négres at the Sturm-Soirée in the Galerie Dada on 14 April 1917. ⁷ Tristan Tzara, „Chronique zurichoise“, in: Richard Huelsenbeck (Hg.): Dada Almanach, Berlin 1920, S. 10-28, here S. 17. Hugo Ball, on the other hand, names the dancer Maria Cantarelli instead of Chrusecz in his diary, see Eckhard Faul and Bernd Wacker (Hg.), Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, Göttingen 2018, S. 133.

In Switzerland, Chrusecz specialized in designing women’s clothing, as Suzanne Perrottet, a collaborator and partner of Laban, recalled: “I was told she would support the Dadaists with money, as she made a good living as a private Haut Couturier. She was beautiful, witty, lively, and charming. . . . Maya Kruschek (sic) helped us a lot. She made beautiful dresses for Mary Wigman, who needed to present a lot: a beautiful evening dress and a coat for the theater.” ⁸ Suzanne Perrottet, Die Befreiung des Körpers: Erinnerungen, Wädenswil, 2014, p. 106–108.

Whether Chrusecz worked as a couturière independently or as an employee remains unclear. In her letters to Tristan Tzara, whom she met in 1917, she described her business trips to places like Bern, Flims, Lugano, Neuchâtel, and St. Moritz, where she stayed in the finest hotels, showcased her fashion, and sold to a wealthy clientele. ⁹ The letters from Maya Chrusecz to Tristan Tzara from the period between 1917 and 1931 are located at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. Several of them have been published in Raoul Schrott, Dada 15/25, expanded new edition, Cologne, 2004. In August 1919, she recounted a stopover in Zurich: “. . . at 5 p.m. to the shop, quickly made some arrangements, withdrew money, and went to the hairdresser.” ¹⁰ Letter from Maya Chrusecz to Tristan Tzara, 13 August 1919, in: ibid., p. 234. It was not possible to determine whether she owned a business in Zurich similar to the ladies' tailoring shop she later had in Hamburg. She may have worked for the Wiener Werkstätte, which had a branch in Zurich starting in 1917.

Through a brief liaison with Gottfried Harms, she entered the circle of Hamburg writer Hans Henny Jahnn. In 1926, she designed his costume made of yellow silk, which “combined Chinese and Greek Orthodox elements,” ¹¹ Cf. Thomas Freeman, Hans Henny Jahnn: Eine Biographie, Hamburg, 1986, p. 238 and 240. for the Hamburger Künstlerfest (Festival of Hamburg Artists) Noa Tawa at the Curiohaus and executed it in collaboration with him. In 1946, she became a member of the Bund zur Erneuerung Ugrinos (Society for the Renewal of Ugrino), an artists’ community initiated in 1918 by Harms, Jahnn, and Franz Buse. Chrusecz worked as a dressmaker from now on; in 1931, she opened a shop on Uhlenhorster Weg, which she continued to run at various locations until 1955.

Working on biographies is one of the most exciting fields in historical research: gathering information about the subject’s life, the places where they lived, and their work, and placing them in their chronological and societal context. Even these seemingly dry facts read like a novel in the case of Grete Gross. The frequency with which she found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to flee due to her citizenship or background is astounding. With each newly discovered phase, each twist, curiosity grows, but so do new questions, which extend far beyond her artistic creations.

Adrienne Elisabeth Margarethe (Grete) Gross was born in 1890 in Riga, then part of Russia. She came from a merchant family with German roots and was baptized Protestant. Already in Riga, orphaned at an early age, she took drawing lessons, but left her homeland upon reaching adulthood in 1911. That same year she began her studies at the “flourishing” Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg. According to her, it was her drawing teacher who encouraged her to do so. ¹ “Hamburgs schaffende Frauen: Die Werbeleiterin,” in: Hamburger Anzeiger, 24 July 1931, p. 4, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Carl von Ossietzky, Germany, public domain.

Many details about Gross's career, personal life, and all quotations from Gross are sourced from this newspaper article in the style of a home story, but should also be seen as self-promotion. Her registration forms from the summer semester of 1912 have survived and document courses with Wilhelm Niemeyer (history of artistic styles), Willi Titze (life drawing), and, beginning in 1913, decorative art with Carl Otto Czeschka. ² Archive, Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, registration forms.

During her studies at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, she not only learned her craft but also used the school as a springboard to build a network, which she did not have as an independent young woman far from home. She took the initiative early on by engaging in clever self-marketing.

A gap in the registration documents during World War I hints at a first interruption in Gross’s biography: During a stay in Vienna, likely connected with her studies with Czeschka, she was interned due to her Russian citizenship. After six months, her Baltic relatives managed to bring her back to the now independent Riga, but during the Soviet Russian troops’ invasion in January 1919, she had to flee again as a citizen of German descent. She returned to Hamburg and resumed her studies in Paul Helms’s class, although the records suggest only sporadically. By then she had other plans: she was making a name for herself in Hamburg as a graphic designer.

For the Hamburg costume festival Dämmerung der Zeitlosen (Twilight of the Timeless) in March 1919, she designed what she called her first poster: dancers and a conductor in tails merge into a dynamic entity against a black background. ³ Mathias Mainholz, Rüdiger Schütt, Sabine Walter, Hamburger Künstlerfeste 1914–1933, in: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (ed.), 1994, p. 5, original at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. However, the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin contains a work dated 1914 for the Baltische Illustrierte Zeitung which contradicts the statement made by Grete Gross. In May she exhibited at the Leipziger Entwurfs- und Modellmesse, a showcase for high-quality arts and crafts and the precursor to the famous Grassi Fair. ⁴ Grassimuseum, Leipzig (ed.), 125 Jahre Museum für Kunsthandwerk, 2 volumes, no. 2, 1999, p. 121 f., p. 124. She created works for companies like Pausa in Stuttgart, a weaving workshop that was associated with the Werkbund and the Bauhaus. ⁵ Das Plakat, magazine of the Verein für Plakatfreunde e.V., 12/1921, no. 7/8, July/August 1921.

Another connection that significantly shaped Gross’s career path was with the Hamburg writing instrument manufacturer Simplo, later known as Montblanc. For them she designed a poster that humorously addressed the political situation: “Even after the revolution, Montblanc remains the king of fountain pens.” Appropriately, a falling crown surrounds the advertised product. Motifs like this caught the attention of Simplo partner Wilhelm Dziambor, responsible for advertising and sales. He recognized the need for modern customer outreach and planned to establish an in-house advertising department. Gross seemed predestined for this task, and he hired the recently graduated graphic designer in August 1919. ⁶ Montblanc archive, Hamburg, Rösler Collection: draft certificate, G. Gross, 1934.

The designs by “Gre-Gro” (her signature and personal abbreviation) were immediately successful. Through stylized forms, dynamic layouts, and bold typography, she established a modern, distinctive style, ensuring visibility. The visual communication under her direction followed a holistic approach: advertisements, store design, trade fair appearances, packaging, and vehicles were coordinated. Her greatest legacy, however, is the Montblanc wordmark, which has survived with only slight modifications to this day. Some evidence of her innovative marketing ideas also survives: for instance, during a ride on the Graf Zeppelin airship, she sent a postcard to a trade magazine, casually proving that “the Montblanc fountain pen writes flawlessly even at 1000 meters’ altitude”. ⁷ Montblanc archive, Hamburg and Luftschiffbau Zeppelin archive, Friedrichshafen, no. 16-368; trip report 178-1931.

Gross thus embarked on a career trajectory that was steep for a woman of her era. As the advertising manager, she was granted general power of attorney in 1925, making her a member of the executive board. ⁸ Amtlicher Anzeiger, vol. 1925, first half, Lütcke & Wulff, Eines Hohen Senats Buchdrucker, Hamburg, 1925, p. 216. Outside the company as well, she was now a sought-after advertising expert. She was mentioned in professional publications ⁹ Cf. Die deutsche Reklame-Industrie, special edition on the Reichs-Reklame-Messe, Berlin, 1925. and even documented giving a lecture at an advertising conference in the United States in 1928. ¹⁰ Passenger ID 9011984325312, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. However, this also explains why, from the mid-1920s on, no works personally designed by her are known. Her rise necessitated a shift from creation to conception. In a 1931 newspaper interview, she remarked with pride: “For years I have hardly done any execution myself, I . . . direct, instruct, supervise the whole thing.” ¹¹ Cf. Hamburger Anzeiger, 1931.

Yet where did she find the confidence to assert herself at just 29 years old among merchants, factory owners, and Hamburg’s high society? From the outside, her ambition and determination stand out. Contemporary witnesses speak of her as “a personality” with great self-confidence. There is also talk of arrogance, and unsurprisingly it was suspected that she had achieved her position through an affair. The fact is that with her demeanor and demands, she did not make friends easily. It is all the more impressive that she did not encounter the often-discussed “glass ceiling” at Montblanc, and indeed quickly succeeded, advanced, and continued working there for 15 years. It is unlikely that all the details will ever come to light, but that is also secondary. More interesting, I find, is the question of whether a man’s career would have been similarly scrutinized. It is a topic that could not be more current. One can easily imagine Grete Gross today in an advertising agency, asserting herself against the egos of her male colleagues. How would I have reacted to this colleague?

Gross had little time aside from her job, yet she also engaged privately in the fight against patriarchal structures, for obvious reasons. In 1929, she became vice-president of the newly founded Verband der werbetätigen Frauen Deutschlands (Association of Women in Advertising in Germany). ¹² H. K. Frenzel, Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art, vol. 7, no. 35, 1929, p. 602. In 1931 she was among the founders of the first German Zonta club, an organization aiming to raise the status of women. ¹³ Traute Hoffmann, Der erste deutsche Zonta-Club: Auf den Spuren außergewöhnlicher Frauen, Munich, 2006, p. 97–99. Otherwise, little is known about Gross’s private life. She remained single and lived comfortably with dogs and cats in a house near Hamburg’s Elbchaussee during her time as advertising manager. She used the company address in Hamburg’s Sternschanze as her emergency contact when traveling.

At the end of 1934, after about 15 years, Gross’s time at Montblanc ended. With her designs and ideas, she significantly shaped the company, but after a generational change in the executive board, she lost support. Her patron Dziambor retired, and the successors pushed for a new beginning. The parties agreed to support Gross in establishing her own advertising studio, but otherwise to part ways. ¹⁴ Montblanc archive, Hamburg, Rösler Collection: “Vereinbarung zwischen der Montblanc-Simplo GmbH und Fräulein Grete Gross,” 30 November 1934. Her studio, called the Gre-Gro Meisterwerkstätten, opened in 1935 at one of Hamburg’s prime addresses, Jungfernstieg. ¹⁵ Reichspostdirektion Hamburg (ed.), Amtliches Fernsprechbuch für den Reichspostdirektionsbezirk Hamburg 1937, p. 185. Little is known about the work and clients there, but it is certain that the company was not successful. It only lasted about two years and retrospectively marks a break in Gross’s biography. The political and societal environment after the Nazis came to power is seen as one reason for this. Gross tried to adapt to the system by, for example, joining the Nationalsozialistische Reichsfachschaft deutscher Werbefachleute (NSRDW, National Socialist Reich Association of German Advertising Professionals). In 1934, as the separation was already looming, she also designed a stand for the Women’s Economic Chamber at the Braune Hansamesse, a propaganda fair, displaying various roles of women in the Nazi state. ¹⁶ “Braune Messe Bremen: Die Beteiligung der Frauenwirtschaftskammer,” in: Hamburger Anzeiger, 16 June 1934, p. 9, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Carl von Ossietzky, Germany, public domain. However, Gross, the emancipated, single entrepreneur with leadership ambitions, fit none of them.

Thus, she left Hamburg around 1937 and settled as an advertising consultant in Frankfurt am Main. ¹⁷ Frankfurter Adressbuch für das Jahr 1938, Verlag August Scherl Nachfolger, Frankfurt, 1937, p. 229. Whether she ever practiced this profession is unknown; Frankfurt remained a waypoint. At the latest, the outbreak of war in 1939 deprived her of a livelihood in the advertising industry, and so she repositioned herself. She utilized her commercial instinct, her knowledge of the stationery industry, and the political circumstances, moving in January 1940 to the German-occupied Łódź (then Lodsch, later Litzmannstadt, now part of Poland). Her attempt to be recognized and supported as a Baltic German resettler by the authorities failed, since she had already acquired German citizenship in 1924. ¹⁸ German Federal Archives, file extract R497958, 4 August 1940. Nonetheless, she took a position as “acting manager” of what was likely an expropriated stationery store in the city center and operated it as Grete Gross Zeichen- und Bürobedarf until 1944. This is documented by numerous advertising announcements in the Litzmannstädter Zeitung. ¹⁹ For example, Litzmannstädter Zeitung with the official announcements for the city and district of Litzmannstadt, 24 August 1944, vol. 27, no. 235. There are also individual ads demonstrating how Gross sought to rebuild a bourgeois existence. She was looking for a housekeeper and also a dog—a wire-haired schnauzer like the one she had in her Hamburg days. These are the last known signs of life from Grete Gross. Whether she survived the capture of Litzmannstadt by the Red Army in January 1945 or a possible escape is not known.

Did Grete Gross ever see herself as an artist? As a practicing graphic designer, she worked for only about five years, with only about 50 known works. These were technically up to the standards of her time, but they alone do not explain the interest in her biography. It is her obstacle-ridden career path, her meteoric rise, the break during the Nazi era, and not least the mystery of her whereabouts that fascinate, and also touch.

Especially regarding Gross’s activities during the Nazi era, one wonders how one would have acted in her place. From today’s perspective, it may seem naive, but perhaps Gross believed that as a feminist, by participating in the propaganda fair, she could change something for the better? Or later, from 1939, as Gross opportunistically used that unjust system to her advantage, which just then had hindered her professional advancement. Could we have set aside our scruples, or perhaps even seen this as compensation?
We will very likely never know Gross’s motives. To judge seems inappropriate given the complexity and lack of information. The ambivalence in her biography, in my opinion, makes it particularly intriguing. It is an illustrative example that positives and negatives, impressive and questionable aspects can—perhaps even must—coexist. It is a biography worth reflecting on and researching further.

My thanks go to Johanna Lessmann, Dr. Julia Meer, Jens Rösler, Peter Sommer, and Poul Lund, without whose research our knowledge of Grete Gross would be much less.

The approximately 360 photographs in the estate of photographer Elsbeth Köster convey the image of an agile and versatile artist. Köster, who studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau and the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg in the early 1930s, worked undeterred by the boundaries of genres and photographed portraits, landscapes, and architecture as equals, creating photographs of animals and objects as well as narrative photographic reports. While she occasionally picked up stylistic inspirations from the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement, she drew less from photographic modernism’s visual language than from an approach to her craft that was guided by mobility and spontaneity. She found her subjects outside the studio, approached them with a handheld camera, circled them in search of the right perspective, and often captured them in multi-part series. Despite numerous exhibitions and publications, especially in the 1930s, Köster’s work is largely unknown today, and her biography can only be reconstructed in fragments.

Elsbeth Köster was born on 12 December 1894 in Hamburg. ¹ Cf. student file on Elsbeth Köster, HFBK Hamburg archive. Her grandfather Karl Köster was married to a sister of the well-known theologian and social-reform politician Johann Hinrich Wichern, the founder of the Rauhes Haus, which was dedicated to the care of neglected children. His brother was Heinrich Köster, who established a housing foundation for families with many children in his will in 1885—a social environment that greatly influenced the budding artist. ² I would like to thank Christoph Thiemann from Hamburg for the many helpful suggestions regarding Elsbeth Köster’s biography. His mother had been friends with Köster since the 1930s. Köster also bequeathed her photographic estate to him, which Thiemann then donated to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg in 2017. After finishing school, Elsbeth Köster initially trained as a hand weaver, and in 1926 she registered a business for a weaving workshop at Oberaltenallee 12. ³ Business registration certificate from the Hamburg police, no. 17555/1926, collection of Christoph Thiemann. In 1927, the Kunstgewerbeverein zu Hamburg presented Köster’s work in the publication Hamburgische Werkkunst der Gegenwart, which highlighted innovative approaches in arts and crafts. The publication featured two bags and a buttoned band that Köster had designed with an abstract pattern of colorful strips in different lengths and widths. ⁴ Kunstgewerbeverein zu Hamburg (ed.), Hamburgische Werkkunst der Gegenwart, Hamburg, 1927, plate 30.

In the following years, Köster apparently decided on a career change. In September 1928, she was admitted to the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg. On the registration form, she still listed “weaver” as her profession, but the addition that she had passed her journeyman’s examination at the Hamburg Chamber of Crafts “without prior apprenticeship” ⁵ Student file, cf. note 1. Later, the profession was changed by someone else to “photographer.” aaround Easter in 1928 might indicate a self-taught education in photography, especially since Johannes Grubenbecher, her later teacher, required “practical preparation” from his students. ⁶ Leaflet with information about the photography class at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg, January 1931, collection of Christoph Thiemann. Before Köster began her studies in Hamburg, she attended a preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Dessau from October 1929 to March 1930. ⁷ “Köster, Elsbeth,” from the database of the Forschungsstelle für Biografien ehemaliger Bauhaus-Angehöriger (BeBA), last accessed: 2 June 2024. From the summer semester of 1930, she finally studied for seven semesters at the Landeskunstschule, as a “full-time student” in the photography class taught by Grubenbecher. ⁸ Student file, see note 2. An impression of his teaching can be gained from a six-page leaflet on the photography class from January 1931. The cover image—a photomontage overlapping the image of a young photographer with a folding camera and a view of a staircase from below—indicates openness to experimental approaches, but otherwise, analytical object studies in the spirit of the New Objectivity dominate a decidedly more conservative visual language. The traditional genres of photography from portrait to “advertising photo” are explicitly addressed in the text, with the goal of capturing “things in form and structure vividly” and “expressively” shaping them. ⁹ Leaflet on the photography class, cf. note 6. Thus, Grubenbecher’s priority was training in the craft, and not artistic education.

The years following her studies appear to have been the most productive phase in Köster’s artistic career. This period also included numerous exhibitions in which she participated. These included the Christmas fair of the Hamburger Kunstverein in December 1932. A review in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt praised the “excellent camera art” of Ernst Scheel, Elsbeth Köster, Olga Linckelmann, and Clara Nonne, ¹⁰ M. K. R., “Die kunstgewerbliche Weihnachtsmesse des Kunstvereins,” in: Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 343, 10 December 1932, p. 2. who were likely encouraged by the art association’s director, Hildebrand Gurlitt, to participate in the show. ¹¹ Cf. Hans Bunge (ed.), Ernst Scheel: Fotograf 1903–1986, Munich, Hamburg, 2015, p. 244. A year later, Köster was again featured in an exhibition by the Kunstverein. Her portraits of children made visiting the exhibition “extremely worthwhile,” according to the Hamburger Fremdenblatt. “The unconscious yet self-assured way of expressing all the processes of the child’s mind can only be conveyed powerfully by very few. In this respect, Köster’s works are of outstanding insight. Handled unsentimentally and objectively, they are wonderfully lifelike and natural. The technical execution is also masterful. The figures stand sharp and sculptural in the space, prominent fields of light and shadow enliven and lend detail to the picture, and all harshness and imbalances in tone are absent.” ¹² M. K. R., “Kinder-Photographien,” in: Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 353, 22 December 1933, p. 3. According to a review, the exhibition took place at “the branch of the Kunstverein, Bergstraße 23.” Over the following years, Köster continued to explore depictions of childhood, as evidenced by a report about a gallery exhibition in 1938. Cf. Karla Eckert, “Hamburger Kunstchronik,” in: Hamburger Tageblatt, 163, 18 June 1938, p. 3. SIn May 1934, there was another exhibition at the Kunstverein, where Köster exhibited her photographs together with paintings and graphics by others, including Eduard Bargheer. ¹³ H. B., “Bilder Hamburger Maler,” in: Hamburger Tageblatt, 142, 25 May 1934, p. 6. The article explicitly mentions Köster’s “charming and sometimes figuratively interesting photographs.” A review stated: “Among the works by E[lsbeth] Köster, the series from the Amrum tidal flats is particularly valuable and delightful: The diversity of the beach scenery is made apparent and compelling in a surprising way.” ¹⁴ M. K. R., “Ausstellung im Kunstverein: Hamburger Künstler,” in: Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 135, 17 May 1934, evening edition, p. 2. Elsbeth Köster’s circle of friends also particularly valued her photographs of Amrum. As late as 1958, an acquaintance requested new prints by letter. Information from Christoph Thiemann, cf. note 2.

The themes Köster devoted herself to in the 1930s are reflected in this review. These include the cultural sphere of northern Germany and the landscapes of the North Sea coast, as well as the exploration of childhood and children’s personalities. Köster did not rely on traditional portraits for this topic, but preferred to work in series, which she captured in rapid succession like film sequences. Köster’s estate includes three panels, each displaying three or eight pictures showing a child picking flowers and doing crafts with paper and scissors. The panels illustrate that taking photographs in series was not just a step in the process toward a single meaningful image, but that Köster conceived these series as cohesive units and presented them as such. In other examples, she follows a child playing with building blocks or mimicking the sorting of harvested apples in an orchard. Childlike curiosity, learning processes, and personality development are closely intertwined and cannot be captured in their full complexity in a single image. Köster’s pictures of children can also be seen as documents of a notion of childhood that continued to evolve during the Weimar period, influenced by reform pedagogy and the “Declaration of the Rights of the Child” adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. ¹⁵ Cf. “Eine kurze Geschichte der Kinderrechte”, last accessed: 10.6.2024.

Köster also used the technique of series or narrative storytelling in her second central thematic focus, the exploration of the landscape and culture of northern Germany. Her pictures of the Amrum coast almost resemble a study of natural history, illustrating how the structures of the tidal flats gradually emerge from the water’s surface at low tide. Köster’s captions indicate that she photographed these images with a Leica in September 1933. ¹⁶ Individual prints include details about the lens (“Elmar”), camera (“Leica”), and the month the photograph was taken (“September”). The subjects of these prints are in some cases identical to large-scale works that Köster mounted on cardboard for an exhibition and likely presented in May 1934 at the Kunstverein. Cf. note 14. Here, the parallel to the work of Alfred Ehrhardt, whose well-known photographs of the tidal flats also began in 1933, is striking. ¹⁷ Alfred Ehrhardt, Das Watt, Hamburg, Leipzig, 1937, p. 13. However, Ehrhardt focused on the diverse structures of the tidal flats, while Köster was more interested in the changing tides and the overall landscape.

Köster’s engagement with natural phenomena itself remained more of an exception in her work, but she repeatedly devoted herself to the use of natural materials in traditional crafts. In a multi-part photographic report, she examined the work of a basket weaver in Cranz on the Lower Elbe and captured the individual steps from drying the willow twigs to sharpening the rods to the creation of the wickerwork. Similarly, Köster also documented the work of thatchers on the island of Föhr repairing a historic thatched roof. In these pictures, she showed the sewing of reed bundles on the roof surfaces as well as the securing of the roof ridge with sods and wooden pegs. Some of the prints from these two series are mounted on cardboard with short descriptions in typewriting. Köster also wrote a brief text explaining the work process of the basket weaver and outlined how the baskets from Cranz were used at the fish markets in Cuxhaven and Altona. Köster likely conceived these works—as well as her other pictorial reports from rural Northern Germany—with the idea of publication in magazines or books in mind, though none has not yet been documented. Thematically, Köster moved in a field that many artists of her time explored: pictures of people and their place in the social structure. However, instead of creating physiognomic studies or typological portraits, Köster focused on human action, skills, and traditions, similar to how she portrayed universal experiences of a lifespan in her children’s pictures rather than individuals.

Köster’s works combining images and text from the mid-1930s on may also indicate that she was increasingly seeking publication opportunities that could secure her livelihood during this time. ¹⁸ During this period, Köster also placed newspaper ads seeking private portrait commissions. For instance, in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt on 29 November 1940 on page 4, there is a brief ad: “Elsbeth Köster / Hamburg 13 / Böttgerstr. 2 / Children’s photos” under the section “Photographs: a beautiful Christmas gift.” For example, photographs by Köster accompanied an article by Konrad Hüseler about 18th-century porcelain figures from the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg in 1939. ¹⁹ Konrad Hüseler, “Italienische Stegreifkomödie in deutschem Porzellan,” in: Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen, vol. 11, 1939, p. 114–117. The article names Köster as a photographer, but some of the photographs could have also been taken as early as 1930, when the then director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Max Sauerlandt, had invited Grubenbecher to photograph exhibits at the museum with his class. Köster’s photograph of a Harlequin bears a great resemblance to a subject that Sauerlandt used in 1930 for publication, and which appears in a slightly modified form on the flyer for Grubenbecher’s photography class. Cf. David Klemm, Das Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Hamburg, 2004, pp. 254, 316. See also note 6. She received an even more extensive assignment around 1942 from the Deutsches Ledermuseum in Offenbach, which was preparing a commemorative publication for its 25th anniversary. Some 40 photographs from the museum are included in the estate, showing primarily bags, shoes, and clothing from different countries and periods, as well as musical instruments and figures from Southeast Asian shadow theater. Notably, Köster showed the collection items in the exhibition context, mostly in groups with other objects and seen through the panes of the display cases, so that reflections and shadows of other objects in the room added to a very lively impression, thus following her narrative approach of earlier series. For the commemorative publication, the museum eventually used images by ten photographers, and only two of Köster’s photographs were included. ²⁰ Das Deutsche Ledermuseum: Zum 25jährigen Jubiläum im Kriegsjahr 1942, Offenbach, 1942, p. 20, p. 188.

Köster’s artistic activity in the years after the end of the war is difficult to discern. It seems that she did not create extensive bodies of work like those in the 1930s. Köster obtained a press pass in September 1949, but concrete evidence of publications in newspapers and magazines is lacking. She may also have worked with Johannes Grubenbecher during this time, who produced extensive series of photographs for architectural history publications after his retirement in 1953. That Köster’s architectural photographs mostly date from this time could be evidence of this collaboration. ²¹ Furthermore, according to Christoph Thiemann, Grubenbecher’s travel logs from 1958 contain notes on joint visits to architectural monuments. Around 1960, Köster finally gave up active photography. In 1965, she moved with Grubenbecher, with whom she had been living since 1947, to a farm in rural Hesse, and a few years after his death, she moved into a nursing home in Korbach. ²² Information from Christoph Thiemann, cf. note 2. There, Elsbeth Köster passed away on 13 May 1974. She bequeathed her photographic estate to a friend from Hamburg, thus ensuring that her work, in which she always prioritized empathetic documentation over the seen against all aesthetic questions, was not lost.

In 1924, Alen Müller had an experience that left a deep impression on her. She met the already successful designer and interior decorator Lilly Reich in her Frankfurt apartment, which was furnished with all the insignia of modern design: “But what I saw there was light wood, very smooth, clear lines, everything designed simply, no frills or ornaments on the furniture . . . and yet it looked precious. I was completely thrilled and happy.” ¹ Most of the information about the work and life of Alen Müller-Hellwig I owe to the texts of Susanne Harth, particularly her article “Erinnerungen an eine Zeit des Aufbruchs: Alen Müller und ihr Weg in die Moderne,” in: Jahrbuch des Museums für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 9, 10, 1990/91, p. 195–232.

Müller came from a traditionally rooted yet open-minded family from Lübeck. Her mother, Magdalene Müller, had worked as a drawing teacher for a time, created designs for weaving works, and is said to have been the model for a character in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger. Her grandfather, the lawyer, politician, and crafts patron Adolf Brehmer, was friends with Justus Brinckmann, the founder and director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Her father, Karl Müller, was a senior government official and was frequently transferred. Thus, Alen Müller was born in 1901 in the town of Lauenburg in Pomerania and spent her childhood in various places. Wherever she was, she loved gardens, nature, and drawing. However, after World War I, the family’s fortune dwindled, and Alen had to learn a profession.

At eighteen, she wanted to train as a pattern designer, but as a woman, she was unable to gain admission. ² A formal art education for women was far from a given. Famously, even at the Bauhaus, the number of women was kept low, and, with few exceptions, they were relegated to weaving, the so-called women’s class. Richard Meyer, the progressively oriented director of the Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg, admitted women as early as 1907, initially only to audit classes. However, she was able to start at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg during the summer semester of 1920 in the workshop for female handicrafts, led by Maria Brinckmann. The trouser-wearing, pipe-smoking daughter of Justus Brinckmann was the school’s first female teacher.

Under Paul Helms, who was responsible for design and graphics, Müller learned not only to refine designs with precise combinations of shape, color, and technique but also to study nature closely. The Kunstgewerbeschule had plant and animal specimens in the Schumacher building at Lerchenfeld for drawing from nature, which she had loved since childhood. Simultaneously, Brinckmann encouraged her to think innovatively in terms of technique and design. She eagerly experimented with different materials such as linen and tulle. Initially, she had to focus on embroidery because she was considered physically weak. Secretly, she practiced on the looms of others until she was finally allowed to weave officially.

In her free time, Müller attended lectures by anthroposophists and performances of expressive dance by Mary Wigman. Her inclination toward dance was so strong that she encouraged the introduction of courses in dance gymnastics at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg. In the summer semester of 1923, she moved to the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich and attended the weaving workshop of the Bauhaus in Weimar on her way there. Since it was during the summer break, she found the looms deserted and untidy, and she felt there was little of interest to see there, although innovative weaving works designed based on the textile structure were already being created there. Disappointed also by the training in Munich, Müller returned to Hamburg for the winter semester of 1924/25 and once again joined Paul Helms’s class at the Kunstgewerbeschule. ³ See Harth 1990/91, p. 24, based on a conversation the author had with Alen Müller-Hellwig on 28 July 1988. The student record after 1923 only notes a summer semester of evening classes in 1926.

In 1926, she opened her own hand-weaving workshop in the attic of her parents’ house in Lübeck. Later, from 1934 on, she was able to operate it in the late Gothic Burgtor, the northernmost gate of the former Lübeck city fortifications. She worked and lived in the tower with the adjacent tollkeeper’s house, as later did the violin maker Günther Hellwig, whom she married in 1937.

Even during her time at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Müller often eschewed color in her embroidery, working only with white or cream-colored yarns, so that the patterns emerged primarily from the material itself. When she received a commission in 1926 to transform a woodcut into a tapestry, she used undyed and hand-spun wool instead of bleached white and dyed black wool for the first time.

Soon, she was bicycling to shepherds to select the animals whose wool she wanted to use. The fibers were not washed before, but after spinning, for which she hired her own spinners. This processing technique resulted in a variety of natural shades, from silky white to beige or bluish shimmering gray and brown tones to deep black. Later, llama wool expanded the color palette.

Müller frequently developed motifs from the weaving technique itself. Beginning in 1927, she created several versions of her most famous wall hanging. Starting from the angular shapes of fruit trees trained on trellises, Der Baum translated the forms of the trunk, branches, leaves, and fruits into rectangles, thus transforming a figurative motif into abstract, geometric shapes. ⁴ Her works from the latter half of the 1920s are exhibited in the Hamburger Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in the room “Abstraktion Moderne,” alongside modernist furniture and designs from the Bauhaus circle. Displayed there are some design sketches (gouaches) as well as the work Baum and the wall hanging Kleine Mühle (1928), in which the subject is suggested by black and natural-colored squares, rectangles, and thin stripes.

Conceptually, the carpet duo Positiv und Negativ (1927) featured flower-like symbols in a chessboard-like structure in white sheep’s wool on brown llama wool, and in contrasting alternation. Possibly alluding to the development process of photography, this work realized the conceptual possibility of alternating colors inherent in the two-tone design.

With natural-colored wall hangings and floor rugs, Müller gained success starting in 1927 at the Grassimesse in Leipzig. Subsequently, her works were acquired by various museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Her pieces also complemented the design of two of the most famous buildings of the Neues Bauen (New Building) movement: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich furnished the Barcelona Pavilion for the 1929 World’s Fair and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno (1929/30) with Müller’s sheep wool rugs. In Brno, it was a fluffy, natural white rug that defined the living area on ivory-colored linoleum. Other architects and private individuals also ordered her large floor rugs.

After the rise to power of the Nazis, many avant-garde architects lost their opportunities to work, and with them, Alen Müller lost a significant clientele. She did not return from her trip to the United States for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair with the number of commissions she had hoped to gain. Previously inclined toward the clear, reduced forms of modernism, she now made use of more traditional expressions. Textiles were frequently requested for the furnishing of military and administrative buildings built after 1933, such as the Ministry of Aviation. Between 1934 and 1939, she collaborated closely with Alfred Mahlau, who created some seventy designs for Müller. ⁵ Cf. Anja Prölß-Kammerer, Die Tapisserie im Nationalsozialismus: Propaganda, Repräsentation und Produktion, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York, 2000, p. 86–93. Companies such as Messerschmidt and Beiersdorf also purchased her works.

The neo-romantic, traditionalist painter and much-sought-after graphic artist, who also designed the packaging for Niederegger marzipan, did not shy away from proximity to the Nazi regime ⁶ He was an artistic advisor at the Reichskontor of the Nazi-oriented Nordische Gesellschaft, was appointed to the Preußische Akademie der Künste during the Gleichschaltung, and made it onto the “divinely gifted” list of Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.: “Like many contemporaries, the artist chose an individual opportunistic path between distance and adaptation during the Nazi era.“ ⁷ Kirsten Beuster, Alfred Mahlau (1894–1967): Maler, Grafiker und Dozent, Hamburg, 2017, p. 213. Through her cooperation with Mahlau, Alen Müller’s works—including the militaristic Sonnenscheiben mit Schwertern (1938)—took on a conventionally illustrative character. They lost their orientation toward materials and weaving techniques; the threads were spun finer and dyed. ⁸ Cf. Geiger, 1942.
Soon, she employed twenty staff in her workshop. She also served as chair of the Fachschaft für Handweberei (Professional Association for Hand Weaving), part of the Nazi-mandated Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture). ⁹ Barbara Reinhardt, Die Werkstatt für Handweberei von Alen Müller-Hellwig, Hamburg, 1985, p. 28. Shortly after her marriage, when her children were born in 1938 and 1939, Alen Müller-Hellwig withdrew from major commissions. Her close collaboration with Mahlau ended

In the war and early post-war years, the artist returned to subjects from nature, reverting to the nature studies of her student days. Delicate floral patterns in the muted tones of dyed silk stood out against a background of monochromatic, natural wool. With native plants like foxglove, mullein, and cow parsnip, she found her way back to her own preferences.

In the 1960s, her motifs increasingly became mere occasions for pictures, while the implementation once again focused on the material and fabric structure, with abstract signs and geometric shapes becoming more dominant. She often worked with hand-spun silk that she dyed herself. Sometimes, fragile structures emerged where the warp threads were left open in parts according to the motif, as in Fallende Tropfen (1973). She was celebrated with retrospective exhibitions in Lübeck and Kiel. Until the end, she was considered a leading figure in textile art. It was not until the age of 90 that she retired.

The contradictions of the twentieth century are reflected in Alen Müller-Hellwig’s life and work. During the Nazi era, she conformed, and a traditionalist aesthetic defined her oeuvre. Many factors may have favored this: the influence of the historically significant city of Lübeck, her work in the centuries-old structure of the Burgtor, the Nazis’ appreciation of craftsmanship and specifically weaving art, and at the same time the risk of being branded a “cultural Bolshevik” and losing the opportunity to earn a living for herself and her staff. However, other factors influenced her before this period: her visit to Lilly Reich’s modernist apartment, inspirations for experiments with form and materials at the Kunstgewerbeschule, and encounters with the latest arts and crafts at the Grassi fairs. Thus, for many years, she produced textile art that was contemporary and whose innovative power is still palpable today.

Trude Petri began her studies at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg in the spring of 1925, initially attending evening classes. She studied graphic design under Bruno Karberg and Heinrich Pralle. However, from September 1925, withthe winter semester of 1925/26, she began participating in regular daytime classes with a specialization in ceramics. ¹ Cf. student records for Trude Petri, HFBK Hamburg archive. The subjects in which she was particularly involved were ceramics with Max Wünsche and graphic design with Willi Titze. In both classes, besides artistic training, great emphasis was placed on imparting basic knowledge and practical skills in shaping and glazing. The course guidelines for ceramics state: “Theoretical and laboratory lessons provide the student with important knowledge of how to measure and prepare the glaze and clay, as well as related fields. Workshop lessons and practice familiarize the student with the necessary and contemporary working methods, adhering as closely as possible to industrial conditions.” ² Die Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg: Jahresbericht 1912/13 des Direktors Richard Meyer, p. 72. Max Wünsche may have inspired Petri to focus on the white materialporcelain, as the workshop dealt with everything “from coarse clinker to fine porcelain”. ³ Handwritten letter from Max Wünsche to the Berufsschulbehörde (Vocational School Authority), Hamburg, 24 April 1923, personnel records for Max Wünsche, HFBK Hamburg archive. He himself emphasized in a letter that the first Hamburg porcelain was created through his efforts. ⁴ Ibid. Wünsche had extensive experience in his field, was an excellent teacher, and was familiar with numerous ceramic manufacturers from his study visits, including the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin, as the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin (KPM, established in 1763) was called from 1919 on. ⁵ In 1988, its name was changed back to Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin (KPM).

In four semesters of full-time study at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, Petri acquired training that included decorative techniques for porcelain and gained a comprehensive understanding of the artistic disciplines of sculpture, painting, and drawing before moving to Berlin in 1927. Her creative drive led her to the capital, where she hoped to embark on an independent career. Some publications, based on oral accounts, describe Petri’s transfer to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst in Charlottenburg. However, her name cannot be found in the schools’ surviving records. Instead, documents from the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin contain a note from early November 1927 about a model made by Petri. ⁶ Entry from 4 November 1927, model book 13300-15726. Her résumé suggests that she likely attended Otto Gothe’s ceramics class, even though she was not officially enrolled at the school. The year 1928 marked the beginning of her initial freelance work at the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur under the directorship of Nicola Moufang.

In 1929, Trude Petri met the prominent cultural player Günther von Pechmann at the Berlin ceramics manufacturer and secured a permanent position. Before becoming the director of the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin, von Pechmann had led the Department of Industrial Art at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum from 1925, which became Die Neue Sammlung, an independent museum for modern applied arts, in 1926. Von Pechmann was a recognized expert on contemporary design trends and the European design scene, and he was progressive and independent in his early professional years. He was currently concerned with questions of handicraft and industrial design, considering both indispensable and attributing significant importance to both directions. With von Pechmann and Petri, two visionary, open, and creative personalities met at the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin and together contributed successful works to the history of design over several years.

After the tenure of Director Nicola Moufang, who from 1925 to 1929 had focused on producing high-quality individual pieces and sculptural treasures, von Pechmann was tasked with economically revitalizing and modernizing the porcelain manufacturer. From the beginning, he entrusted the young Petri with design tasks that played a key role in the artistic redirection of the manufacturer and reflected his new program, which primarily aimed at renewing functional porcelain. Initially, she focused on redesigning and modernizing older models from the existing product range and designing a tea service.

Between 1932 and 1934, Petri created a design classic comparable to the tubular steel chairs by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: the Urbino dinner service. ⁷ The year 1931, which is commonly cited as the initial release date of Urbino, refers to preliminary designs that were incorporated into another service. It embodied the principles of the Werkbund, such as the demand for simplification, standardization, and functionality, as well as the typical manufactury genesis. Due to its high quality in design and conception, it enjoys iconic status to this day, and it has been continuously produced and sold since its initial release. Urbino enjoyed success with numerous international awards such as the gold medal at the Fourth Milan Triennial in 1936 and the Grand Prix at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, as well as in numerous publications, and it remained a successful product even after World War II. Even after Trude Petri’s emigration to the United States in 1947, the porcelain manufactury continued to collaborate with her. Her designs guaranteed a contemporary style. In 1947, Urbino was expanded to include tea, coffee, and mocha services, and in 1953, a salad service was added. The asymmetrically curved salt and pepper shakers and the vinegar and oil bottles with their extravagantly wide collars, along with the accompanying round and square bowls, represent the new, confident design of the 1950s. Thus, Petri not only shaped the modernist 1930s at the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin but also the post-war modernist era, since she created several more significant products for the company in the 1950s. In addition to functional ceramics, these included vases such as Mantille, Lampion, and Ali Baba, all of which featured an elegant interplay of shape and relief.

While Trude Petri is primarily known for her ceramic designs, several outstanding decorative designs are also attributed to her, such as the gold ring decoration for Marguerite Friedlaender’s Hallesche Form tea service and numerous designs featuring fine depictions of flora or fauna. Petri’s proven abilities in both form and decorative design can certainly be traced back to her versatile talent, but also to her broad studies at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule. The knowledge she acquired in Hamburg enabled her to work independently both at the porcelain manufactory and later in her own workshop. The Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur was Petri’s only employer, and she remained one of its most important designers until the end of their collaboration in the 1960s.

The most productive and fascinating years for Marlene Moeschke’s work and development were her early years in Berlin, which immediately followed her studies in Hamburg. The daughter of a Hamburg wine merchant, she managed to gain admission to the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in 1911. She studied sculpture under her maiden name, Martha Helene Moeschke (later shortened to Marlene Moeschke), with interruptions, under Richard Luksch until 1917. Although artistic education for women was allowed in principle, they still had to fight against the prejudice that their “biologically determined femininity” prevented them from truly creating art. ¹ A brief introduction to the struggle for gender equality in modern times in relation to Marlene Moeschke can be found in: Heike Hambrock, “Marlene Moeschke: Mitarbeiterin?”, in: kritische berichte, 3, 2001, p. 37–39. Only through programs like those at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg could women gain access to professional artistic work in nearly all art forms. Initially, Marlene Moeschke received the necessary support for her artistic career from her mother’s determination to provide her four daughters with an academic professional education, enabling them to live independently. ² Besides Marlene Moeschke, two of her sisters also studied photography at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, albeit with less success. Both often modeled for Moeschke and photographed her works in her studio, allowing many of the early plaster casts from around 1916/17 and later independent works to be at least documented in photographs. The eldest daughter became a teacher., Subsequently, the architect and later Moeschke’s partner Hans Poelzig sought to support and promote her to the best of his abilities. For many women, sculptural work served as an entry into the profession of architecture, and this was also the case for Moeschke. In 1918, she started as an employee and, from 1924 on, under the name Marlene Poelzig, she was officially able to work both collaboratively and independently in the architectural office she shared with Hans Poelzig.

Initially uncertain, Moeschke studied diligently after a short stint in Munich, with forty-two hours of classes per week and additional life-drawing courses, ³ Student records from the HFBK Hamburg archive. Life drawing was still prohibited for women at the beginning of the twentieth century, because drawing from nude models was considered morally dangerous. Cf. Ulrike Krenzlin, “Zur Frauenarbeit im künstlerischen Beruf,” in: Profession ohne Tradition, exh. cat. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 1992, p. 73–87; Anja Cherdron, Berliner Bildhauerinnen der Weimarer Republik (Studien zur visuellen Kultur, vol. 1), Marburg (undated), p. 28ff., enabling her to successfully complete the modeling class (sculpture) with Richard Luksch in 1917 as the only female student. ⁴ The 1916/17 certificate is part of the student file in the HFBK Hamburg archive. Luksch awarded her a grade of “excellent” in all subcategories. However, her grades fluctuated during her first two years of study. She then took the bold step of renting her own studio on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. This offered her a unique opportunity to establish herself as an artist in a major city. Her correspondence with Hans Poelzig, whom she had likely met in the fall of 1917 at a Secession exhibition, shows how difficult it was for a young woman to succeed in Berlin’s artistic circles. By moving to Berlin, Moeschke was able to connect with female sculptors such as Milly Steger, Emy Röder, and Renée Sintenis. She incorporated trends and discussions in sculptural abstraction that were prevalent in the work of her male colleagues, especially Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, and Rudolf Belling. She remained lifelong friends with Belling. ⁵ Around 1920, Rudolf Belling sculpted a kind of portrait bust of Hans Poelzig, in which flickering flame-like shapes split the head into male and female halves. Beyond the common interpretation, this could also allude to his collaboration with the sculptor. Cf. Paul Westheim (ed.), Das Kunstblatt, Potsdam/Berlin, 1920, vol. 12, p. 376. The work is believed to have been destroyed in the war.

A small design sketch from the winter of 1918/19 exemplifies her artistic production during this period. It shows a seated female nude, drawn with simple, abstract, dynamic strokes, with her left leg awkwardly bent—a successful attempt to set the physical mass in motion, almost three-dimensional in form.

Two small sculptures directly relate to this sketch: the porcelain cast of the work Kleine Sitzende (Little Seated Woman) and Knieende (Kneeling Woman), which is documented in a photo of her studio taken by her sister. Hans Poelzig described these works, along with others that have only survived in photographs, in a letter to the sculptor, considering them an evolution of her earlier works for the Volkstedter Porzellanmanufaktur. The new works, he wrote, are “much further than everything that came before,” “wonderful,” and “truly enchanting.” ⁶ Hans Poelzig to Marlene Moeschke, 10 February 1919, letter from Dresden to Berlin, private collection, Hamburg. The naturalism and classical search for the “universally human” that dominated under Luksch receded in favor of more pronounced abstraction, dynamic forms, and expressive, linear movement. The affinity with Ernst Barlach, which Poelzig gently criticized in the linear blockiness of works like Kauernde (Crouching Woman), is no longer apparent. Poelzig rightly emphasized the maturity and originality of her works.

The limited-edition porcelain cast for the Schwarzburg workshops belonging to the Volkstedter Porzellanmanufaktur was typical of the time, since producing for the private market was one of the few ways for sculptors to earn a living independently during the early Weimar Republic. In a letter to Hans Poelzig, Marlene Moeschke expressed frustration that she owed this commission largely to her architect husband’s reputation. She wanted to be independent: “Now I’ll try it on my own, since I have to finally make my art financially viable . . .” ⁷ Marlene Moeschke to Hans Poelzig, 31 January 1919, letter from private collection, Hamburg. Due to negative experiences, she later refrained from acknowledging her authorship to avoid jeopardizing joint commissions.

In 1918/19, commissioned by the architect, who quickly recognized the possibilities and synergy effects of collaborating with the sculptor, she created designs for the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin, a major work of Expressionist architecture. ⁸ Wolfgang Pehnt calls it “the sensational building” in: Wolfgang Pehnt, Matthias Schirren (eds.), Hans Poelzig, Munich, 2007, p. 29–30. The designs included cavernous halls and foyers with colorful, phantasmagoric plant-like capitals, flame-shaped acroteria on the roof, and theater figurines like those on Gothic churches to flank the prominent tent-like entrance portal or illuminate the round foyer ⁹ In some contemporary publications, Marlene Moeschke is explicitly named as the artist of the latter. in stained glass. Only the idea of the gradually evolving column shapes, with changes in lighting, color, and capital design, was realized. Marlene Moeschke managed the work on site, drawing and discussing progress and changes in the design with the architect through written correspondence. Hans Poelzig was stranded in Dresden due to travel restrictions. Further commissions followed, increasingly under the architect’s name, although he often tried to credit his wife in contemporary publications. Later they worked under the label of the Bauatelier Poelzig, which they established together in Potsdam. Though few commissions were realized, they included memorials, a chapel for the Majolika ceramic workshop in Karlsruhe, scenery for the film Golem, concert halls, theaters, and exhibition spaces. Numerous sketches and model photos document her artistic exploration and the quality of her designs. ¹⁰ Cf. Heike Hambrock, Hans und Marlene Poelzig: Bauen im Geist des Barock, Delmenhorst, 2005.

Around 1924, after her marriage and the birth of the first of three children, Marlene Poelzig increasingly focused on residential architecture. She drew visualizations and floor plans, and designed halls and foyers for cinemas and office buildings. Her sculptural creativity often shone through in the details that made the architecture produced by the Bauatelier Poelzig special. The ticket booth, located in the middle of the entrance hall of the Capitol cinema in Berlin from 1924, is one example. To this day, her own sculptural works, like the mosaic fountain with rising calyx shapes in Dresden’s Großer Garten, are often attributed to her husband rather than her. ¹¹ This is also the case in the catalogue raisonné by Pehnt, Schirren, 2007, p. 235.

Unlike her husband, who tried to avoid the debates around modern residential construction in the 1920s, ¹² An interesting manuscript fragment on the topic of flat roofs versus gabled roofs in residential construction has been preserved in the estate of the heirs in Hamburg. In addition to his work for the Werkbund, Poelzig was probably a member of both architectural associations, the socialist Ring and the conservative Block. The author has not been able to determine the extent to which female architects were represented in these associations. Marlene Poelzig fully embraced modern architecture. She made significant contributions to the design of the house at the Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart-Weißenhof (1926/27). In the 1931 exhibition of the Preußische Akademie der Künste Berlin entitled Poelzig und seine Schule, which the couple themselves helped organize, she was recognized as a leading contributor to the project. ¹³ Poelzig und seine Schule, exh. cat., Preußische Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, Berlin, 1931. See Pehnt, Schirren, 2007, p. 236. The single-family house is now considered a precursor to the couple’s own home on Tannenbergallee in Berlin, built by Marlene Poelzig starting in 1929. ¹⁴ After the architect’s death in 1936, Marlene Poelzig had to sell the house. The new owner, actor and director Veit Harlan, added a gabled roof to the building and remodeled the upper floor. Nevertheless, the house remained largely intact until it was sold to an investor a few years ago, though it was not designated as a historic monument. A group of scholars and architects waged a long campaign against the planned demolition and for the building’s preservation. The house’s two-part layout reflects her emancipation as a woman and artist: her studio was on the ground floor of a recessed wing, equal to her husband’s, and clearly separated from the dining area, kitchen, and children’s playroom, which opened onto the garden. Both husband and wife gave a nuanced portrayal of the achievements of the architect and sculptor in contemporary articles on the “architect’s house.” ¹⁵ Cf. Marlene Poelzig, “Das Haus des Architekten,” in: Wasmuths Monatshefte Baukunst & Städtebau, 14, 10, 1930, p. 461–466. See also Mary Pepchinski, Christina Budde, Wolfgang Voigt, Peter Cachola Schmal (eds.), Frau Architekt, exh. cat., Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, 2017, p. 121. In 1930, the building drew significant international attention, but it was later forgotten, mistakenly attributed to Hans Poelzig, or entirely omitted in publications.

The thoughtfully designed house, with its interplay between interior and exterior spaces and playful use of materials, stands among the notable architect homes of the 1920s. The work of the sculptor and her role in the Bauatelier Poelzig deserves to be reassessed. Until its demolition in November 2021, the building stood next to the former home of the sculptor Georg Kolbe, although it was disfigured by a gable roof, showing its varied history. Now this important part of the couple’s legacy has been lost. ¹⁶ Currently, the Haus Marlene Poelzig Initiative, which was established to prevent the demolition of the residence, plans to recreate the building virtually in a publication discussing various current issues, whose release date is planned for June 2025. The observed “failure of historical monument preservation” will be the subject of a symposium on 20 November 2024. For more information, visit hausmarlenepoelzig.de.

Two bulbous glass flasks are arranged diagonally against a bright background. Their shadows are interwoven with reflections of light and stretch across the left half of the photograph, which was taken from an elevated perspective. Not only the labels on the flasks suggest their contents, but also the word “Scherk,” written in red on the print and repeated three times across the diagonal of the image.

This photograph is an advertising image for a facial toner by the Berlin cosmetics company Scherk, created around 1936 as a project by the artist Hildi Heins during her studies at the Staatlichen Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg, renamed in December 1933 ¹ Wolfgang Voigt, “Zwischen Bildersturm und Ausbombung: ‘Hansische Hochschule für bildende Künste’”, in: Hartmut Frank (ed.), Nordlicht, 222 Jahre: Die Hamburger Hochschule für bildende Künste am Lerchenfeld und ihre Vorgeschichte, Hamburg, 1989, p. 212–233, see p. 224, cf. report in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 16 December 1933. to the Hansische Hochschule für bildende Künste. Heins’s artistic approach of combining photographic and typographic elements is characteristic of this photo as well as of the focuses she selected during her studies. From 1934 to 1938, Heins attended classes by the graphic designer Hugo Meier-Thur, photographer Johannes Grubenbecher, the freelance artistic lecturer Rudolf Neugebauer, and courses by Carl Otto Czeschka, who taught painting, and later, graphic design. ² Cf. Alexandra Mangel, “Die eigene Geschichte,” in: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (ed.), Hildi Schmidt Heins: Die eigene Geschichte, Hamburg, 2003, p. 46–59, see p. 48–49. When Czeschka prompted Heins to choose a class and thus a design method, Heins emphasized the important synthesis of photography and graphic design in her artistic work and continued her studies with both Grubenbecher and Czeschka. ³ Cf. Claudia Gabriele Philipp, “Drei Generationen Fotografie,” in: ibid., p. 3. This artistic approach is already visually evident in her study projects, for instance, in the aforementioned advertisement for Scherk’s facial toner, as well as in her photographic works for the Hamburg coffee roastery Stuhr and the Gartmann chocolate factory, whose commissions were facilitated by Johannes Grubenbecher, and some of which were displayed in Hamburg cinemas as still images. ⁴ Cf. Mangel 2003, p. 50.

Steeply inclined perspectives, tight framing, serial arrangements, and a focus on the form, surface, and materiality of objects distinguish Heins’s compositions, which can be attributed to the photography of the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement that emerged in the 1920s. ⁵ Cf. ibid., p. 49. In Heins’s photographs, everyday consumer products underwent an aestheticization that, in the interplay of modern typography and photography, became ingrained in the advertising and product photography of the time. ⁶ Cf. Ulrich Pohlmann, “Die Dinge,” in: ibid., Kathrin Baumstark et al. (eds.), Welt im Umbruch: Kunst der 20er Jahre, Munich, 2019, p. 32–41, see p. 35. From around 1925 on, with the spread of illustrated magazines and newspapers, the role of photography in depicting and promoting goods became increasingly relevant, which was also reflected in the establishment of product photography as an independent sub-discipline in both practice and education. Advertising and product photography became a new field of activity for photographers, introduced into the photography classes at institutions like Burg Giebichenstein, the Kunstgewerbeschule Halle, the Bauhaus, and the Folkwangschule in Essen. ⁷ Cf. Esther Ruelfs, “Werbung: Werbung und die Widerständigkeit der Objekte,” in: ibid., Sabine Schulze (ed.), ReVision: Fotografie im Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Göttingen, 2016, p. 218–227, see p. 222. In Johannes Grubenbecher’s class, where Heins learned the photographic depiction of commercial products, advertising and product photography played an increasingly significant role. ⁸ Cf. ibid.

Hildi Heins’s artistic works from the late 1930s include portrait, landscape, and travel photography: close-up shots of water lily leaves in Hamburg’s Planten un Blomen park, focusing on the materiality and form of the plants, portraits of two Carabinieri in Rome seen from behind, and full-length portrayals of three nuns in dark robes in Brussels, in which a serial arrangement is clearly visible. A 1938 photograph from Travemünde is a double portrait of a man and a woman facing each other. The focus is on the faces, yet due to the extreme perspective and tight framing, the depiction oscillates between tangible proximity and abstracted distance, fitting into the style of the Neues Sehen and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movements.

The Neue Sachlichkeit distanced itself from pictorialism and art photography around 1900, the style to which Hildi Heins’s father, Wilhelm Heins, an amateur photographer and heir to a forestry nursery founded in 1851 in Halstenbek, subscribed. ⁹ Cf. Philipp 2003, p. 3. With his plate camera, around 1900 he primarily photographed his travels and the nursery’s operations, which he captured in his photo studio and developed in his darkroom. ¹⁰ Cf. Mangel 2003, p. 47. This served as the starting point for Hildi Heins’s own interest in photography, which Wilhelm Heins supported both financially and by gifting her a Leica camera. ¹¹ Cf. ibid., p. 46. Due to her bourgeois background and financial support, Heins had a certain freedom in choosing her career, supporting the participation and independence efforts of women and female artists in the Weimar Republic, which was subsumed under the concept of the “New Woman.” Heins began her studies at the Hansische Hochschule für bildende Künste in 1934, a year after its alignment with the Nazi regime following its rise to power. ¹² Cf. ibid., p. 48.

With the dismissal of the director Max Sauerlandt and other anti-regime, communist, or Jewish lecturers, positions were filled with individuals close to the Nazi Party. ¹³ Cf. Voigt 1989; Barbara Uppenkamp, “Forschungsbericht: Die Hansische Hochschule für bildende Künste in der Zeit von 1933 bis 1945,” in: Lerchenfeld, 56, 2021, p. 4–8, see p. 5. Students who did not conform to the Nazi ideology were radically excluded. Nevertheless, the authoritarian, tense atmosphere at the academy did not permeate all classes: Although Hans Grubenbecher was among the denounced teachers in 1934, he resumed teaching by July of the same year, showed his students photographs from outside Germany, and shared information about ostracized artists that went unheard in the controlled press. ¹⁴ Cf. Maike Bruhns, Kunst in der Krise: Hamburger Kunst im ‘Dritten Reich’, Hamburg, Munich, 2001, p. 96. The class of the graphic artist Hugo Meier-Thur was characterized by an artistic, interdisciplinary rather than craft-based approach and became a “safe haven and retreat for students who did not identify with the Nazi ideology.” ¹⁵ Uppenkamp 2021, p. 8. Photographs by Hildi Heins show fellow students Reinhard Albrecht, Hans Kröger, Hildegard Eckert, and Gerhard Schittek with a lecturer—probably Hugo Meier-Thur—around 1936 during a boat trip on the Elbe. They appear cheerful, leaning over the railing, with Schittek playing the accordion. Heins seems to have captured spontaneous moments in these photographs, which, given the small size of the prints, were likely personal snapshots. In 1938, Heins was expelled from the academy for failing to attend a mandatory rally. In a letter dated 15 March 1938, the then-director Paul Fliether announced that he intended to take action against her “behavior detrimental to the community” ¹⁶ Document in the private archive of Barbara and Gabriele Schmidt Heins, quoted from Mangel 2003, p. 51. based on the student disciplinary code. Although not directly threatened by Nazi ideology, Heins was forced to leave the academy in 1938 without obtaining a degree. She subsequently studied for another semester at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. ¹⁷ Cf. Gabriele Betancourt Nuñez, “Die Fotografinnen Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Lotte Genzsch, Natascha A. Brunswick und Hildi Schmidt Heins,” in: Dirk Hempel, Friederike Weimar (eds.), Himmel auf Zeit: Die Kultur der 1920er Jahre in Hamburg, Neumünster, 2010, p. 291–296, see p. 296. In 1939, she found employment as a graphic designer at the Deutsches Handwerksinstitut in Berlin, which was founded in 1929 to promote the economic development of German crafts and was affiliated with the Reichsstand des Deutschen Handwerks from 1933 on. ¹⁸ Cf. Mangel 2003, p. 52. Between 1941 and 1943, Heins photographed crafts businesses and workshops across Germany, capturing their work processes, spaces, and architecture with stylistic elements of the Neue Sachlichkeit. These included portraits of apprentices with tools as well as photos of training rooms with empty rows of tables and staircases from unusual perspectives, themes also found in the works of Albert Renger-Patzsch, Werner Mantz, and Arthur Köster. ¹⁹ Miriam Halwani, “Entortungen: Architekturfotografie der Zwischenkriegsjahre,” in: Pohlmann, Baumstark 2019, p. 108–117, see p. 115. FThe shapes, perspectives, and dynamics in these photos reflect the photographic affirmation and aestheticization of the technologization of society and the apparent progress of modernity, which, in the case of the photographs of crafts businesses, also inscribed themselves in a Nazi interpretation. Nevertheless, her position at the Deutsches Handwerksinstitut provided Heins with financial independence and also prevented her from being drafted into labor service. ²⁰ Cf. Mangel 2003, p. 52.

In 1944, Heins’s son Manfred was born from her first marriage to Günther Scheu, which was dissolved a year later. In 1948, she married Günther Schmidt, owner of a nursery in Rellingen, and a year later, twins Barbara and Gabriele were born. ²¹ Cf. ibid., p. 54. From 1945 on, she largely turned away from photography and distanced herself from the coolness and objectivity of the Neues Sehen, which had surrounded her like an “armor of cold” ²² Ibid., p. 55. during the Nazi era. In 1955, Schmidt Heins attended evening classes with Johannes Itten, a painter and former lecturer at the Bauhaus, as well as with Ivo Hauptmann, chairman of the Hamburg Secession. ²³ Conversation with Gabriele Schmidt Heins on 30 May 2024. She subsequently dedicated herself to visual arts, particularly painting, which increasingly developed into an abstract language of forms in the style of the Informel. ²⁴ Cf. Mangel 2003, p. 55. Schmidt Heins worked as a freelance artist and, alongside her paintings and drawings, created reliefs for public art projects. ²⁵ Cf. “Wiederkehr der Sonnenuhr,” in: sh:z, 1 June 2018, last accessed: 21 May 2024. In the late 1960s, her daughters Barbara and Gabriele Schmidt Heins began their studies at the HFBK Hamburg. They exhibited their conceptual works together with those of Wilhelm Heins and Hildi Schmidt Heins in the exhibition Heins Schmidt Heins: Drei Generationen Fotografie at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in 2004, which coincided with the donation of a collection of works. ²⁶ V In the late 1960s, her daughters Barbara and Gabriele Schmidt Heins began their studies at the HFBK Hamburg. They exhibited their conceptual works together with those of Wilhelm Heins and Hildi Schmidt Heins in the exhibition Heins Schmidt Heins: Drei Generationen Fotografie at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in 2004, which coincided with the donation of a collection of works. ²⁷ The donation to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg included 88 photographs and graphics by Hildi Schmidt Heins. Additional works by the artist, particularly her paintings, are held by her family. Conversation with Gabriele Schmidt Heins on 30 May 2024.. This was the first public showcase of Hildi Schmidt Heins’s photographic achievements. Subsequent exhibitions in which she participated included Eine Frage der Zeit: Vier Fotografinnen in Hamburg der Zwanziger Jahre (2010), which placed Hildi Schmidt Heins in relation to Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Lotte Genzsch, and Natascha A. Brunswick. ²⁸ Cf. Betancourt Nuñez 2010, p. 291–296. Following her death in 2011, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe hosted the exhibitions When We Share More Than Ever (2015) as part of the 6th Triennale of Photography and, in 2023, Wiki Women: Wissen gemeinsam ergänzen. ²⁹ Cf. “Wiki Women: Wissen gemeinsam ergänzen,” press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, last accessed: 21 May 2024. The latter pursued the approach of critically examining the hegemonic canon of art history and the museum’s own collections and showcasing and researching works by female photographers and designers—like Hildi Schmidt Heins—thus retrospectively giving them more visibility.

The Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber began attending the Lehr- und Versuch-Ateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst (Teaching and Experimental Ateliers for Applied and Fine Art) in Munich, later known as the Debschitz-Schule, ¹ After its cofounder Wilhelm von Debschitz. in October 1910. Since its founding in 1902, this school had been one of the most renowned institutions of the reform movement in arts and crafts and offered joint instruction for men and women, as well as workshop courses. Taeuber focused early on wood and textiles. After just one semester, she outlined her career aspirations to her sister Erika Schlegel-Taeuber: “The idea of furnishing rooms for an architect—designing wallpaper, carpets, upholstery, curtains, lamps, and perhaps furniture as well—is the most appealing. But at least in the beginning, I would have to fully master one technique.” ² Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 29 May 1911, in: Medea Hoch, Walburga Krupp, Sigrid Schade (eds.): Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Briefe 1905–1942, Wädenswil, 2021, vol. 1, letter 26.

Her interest in studying textile techniques was likely one of the main reasons Sophie Taeuber transferred to Hamburg in the fall of 1912. When she first considered continuing her education elsewhere at the beginning of the year, she thought of “Berlin, Vienna, or Weimar.” ³ Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 10 January 1912, in: ibid., letter 33. Her decision to choose Hamburg may have been influenced by several people. Her fellow students Louise Maass and Gertrud Weiszflog had studied at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in their hometown of Hamburg before coming to Munich. In the fall of 1911, Taeuber met Olga Brehmer, a painter from Lübeck whose family was friends with Maria Brinckmann, a textile artist and teacher of artistic embroidery in Hamburg. Max Studer, a doctor from St. Gallen and an acquaintance of Taeuber’s sister, probably connected her with the Swiss sculptor Johann Bossard, who had been teaching sculpture in Hamburg since 1907 and had designed a bookplate for Studer. Le Corbusier’s Study of the Decorative Art Movement in Germany, which extensively praised the Hamburg school, only appeared in the fall of 1912 and thus likely did not influence Taeuber’s decision. ⁴ Cf. Mateo Kries, Alexander von Vegesack (eds.), Le Corbusier: Studie über die deutsche Kunstgewerbebewegung, Weil am Rhein, 2008.

On 17 September 1912, Sophie Taeuber enrolled at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg after receiving a written acceptance from its director, Richard Meyer. She did not take the entrance exam, which was mandatory for women. ⁵ Cf. Fritz Schumacher, Die Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule zu Hamburg, Hamburg, 1913, p. 20; Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 13 September 1912, in: Hoch, Krupp, Schade, 2021, vol. 1, letter 40. She registered for the following courses: hand and machine embroidery with Maria Brinckmann; nature studies and design with Franz Karl Delavilla, a designer and graphic artist who had previously worked for the Wiener Werkstätte; and the history of artistic styles with art historian Wilhelm Niemeyer. Brinckmann and Delavilla jointly led the textile art department, but their dual leadership merely perpetuated a familiar pattern: the man taught artistic design, and the woman its technical implementation. Johann Bossard advised Taeuber on her choice of subjects and also recommended furniture design. However, she was greatly disappointed to discover that “the teacher with whom I wanted to study furniture design did not accept women.” ⁶ Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 18 November 1912, in: Hoch, Krupp, Schade, 2021, vol. 1, letter 45. Apparently, the practitioner and instructor of interior design Hans Heller was allowed to exclude women from his classes. ⁷ On the situation of women at the Kunstgewerbeschule, see Susanne Harth, “Frauenstudium: Die Werkstätte für weibliche Handarbeiten,” in: Hartmut Frank (ed.): Nordlicht, 222 Jahre: Die Hamburger Hochschule für bildende Künste am Lerchenfeld und ihre Vorgeschichte, Hamburg, 1989, p. 109–124. Her initial struggles with Delavilla, whom she found “very unimaginative and uninspiring,” ⁸ Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 8 October 1912, in: Hoch, Krupp, Schade, 2021, vol. 1, letter 42. were resolved when he went on an extended leave in November and subsequently transferred to the Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt am Main. Graphic artist and painter Paul Helms took over the class and taught it until the 1940s.

Sophie Taeuber remarked on Maria Brinckmann’s “brilliant knowledge of technique and materials,” but also her inability to pass on this knowledge to her students. ⁹ Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 18 November 1912, in: ibid., letter 45. When Brinckmann used the transition period between Delavilla and Helms to take over the design class as well, the students revolted: “We wanted her to stop correcting the designs and to be placed entirely under Helms. She only fought to achieve independence three months ago with great difficulty. Her manner drives everyone crazy. Almost the whole class wanted to leave because of her. It drove me mad to have to tell her that we don’t find her corrections of the designs adequate. But, being twenty years younger than her, I can’t tell her that the main problem is her aggravating manner.” ¹⁰ Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 20 March 1913, in: ibid., letter 53. .” The weaving artist Alen Müller-Hellwig later had similar experiences: “Maria Brinckmann was extraordinarily intelligent and well educated, but this made it difficult for her to convey simple concepts. She often assumed knowledge from us students that we did not yet possess at our age. Her complexity of thought also manifested in practice. She found it hard to demonstrate weaving techniques. We often couldn’t follow her explanations.” ¹¹ Alen Müller-Hellwig, Bericht über die erste deutsche Webschule Scherrebek und deren Weberinnen, unpublished typescript, Lübeck, 1982.

Sophie Taeuber decided with regret to return to the Debschitz-Schule in Munich after the summer semester 1913, as she valued Helms’s instruction. She never got to see the new school building at Lerchenfeld. However, in September 1913, she contributed to the school’s textile exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg with a crocheted children’s bonnet (fig. 1) and an embroidery, which she considered ‘the best thing she had done so far.’ ¹² See Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 12 August 1913, in: Hoch, Krupp, Schade, 2021, vol. 1, letter 60.

After completing her education in Munich, Sophie Taeuber moved to Zurich in the autumn of 1914 and worked at the Gewerbeschule (Trade School) there from 1916 to 1929, teaching design and embroidery. Since 1915, Gertrud Meyer from Aargau had also taught there. Taeuber had attended Maria Brinckmann’s classes with Meyer in Hamburg in the summer semester of 1913. In Zurich she reconnected with Maria Streckeisen from Basel, whom she knew from her time in Munich, and who had studied design and goldsmithing at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg from 1916 to 1917. Through her Hamburg classmate and friend Louise Maass, Taeuber met her colleague Charlotte Billwiller from St. Gallen at the Zurich branch of the Wiener Werkstätte. Billwiller had also attended the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg from 1914 to 1917, including courses with Maria Brinckmann. In 1917, Elisabeth von Ruckteschell also moved to Zurich after finishing her studies at the Debschitz-Schule and continuing her education at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg from 1913 to 1915. It may have been a coincidence, but in the second half of the 1910s, four Swiss and two Germans, all of whom had studied together in Hamburg, crossed paths in Zurich. Brinckmann’s former students benefited from her wealth of knowledge in techniques and materials. When Dagobert Peche, the head of the Zurich branch of the Wiener Werkstätte, returned to Vienna, he took Charlotte Billwiller and Louise Maass, whose work he greatly appreciated, with him. ¹³ Cf. Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Angela Völker (eds.), Die unbekannte Wiener Werkstätte: Stickereien und Spitzen 1906 bis 1930, Stuttgart, 2017.

Sophie Taeuber not only improved her theoretical and practical knowledge of textile arts in Hamburg, which later influenced her own teaching, but also likely learned about collage as a compositional method from Paul Helms. This technique had already fascinated Le Corbusier during his visit in 1911. It was based on “arranging colors powerfully together, bold reds, blacks, whites, and yellows; afterward, the optimal arrangement is worked out by shifting and aligning motifs within the frame until balance is achieved.” ¹⁴ Cf. Kries, von Vegesack 2008, p. 209. Taeuber used this method for example in designing her carpets, painting individual sketches of elemental shapes and motifs, combining them into a complete composition, and reusing them frequently. In February 1922, she wrote to her sister about the sketch of her work for the Exposition Nationale d’Art Appliqué in Lausanne later that year: “This afternoon, I sent the final drawing for the Lausanne exhibition carpet to Zurich . . . . I really enjoyed drawing it, creating a whole series of small watercolors, which I can easily turn into beaded bags, cushions, carpets, and wall fabrics at any time”. ¹⁵ Sophie Taeuber to Erika Schlegel-Taeuber, 21 February 1922, in: Hoch, Krupp, Schade, 2021, vol. 2, letter 143. Even after she later turned to painting, she retained the collage technique that she had tested on textiles.