Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Gunta Stölzl: Bauhaus Master


Gunta Stölzl was a textile master at Germany's Bauhaus school and workshop in the early 20th century. Born in 1897, she translated modernism into weavings and vice-versa.



She lived until 1983, working in Switzerland after the Nazi takeover of Germany. The website devoted to her work takes you through the various decades, showing how her ideas and colors changed.


During the 1920s she summarized Bauhaus attitudes to design, paring down shape and color to the minimal:

"The richness of colour and form became too licentious for us; it did not adapt itself, it did not subordinate itself to living. We tried to become more simple, to discipline our means...."


Stripes and monochromes in a woven throw.



But most of her life was about color

Something she did remarkably well.

All very licentious----especially for those who love a patchwork color scheme.



She was very productive over a long life so you can find many of her weavings, sketches and paintings by doing websearches for images. You'll find at least one book about her. Do check out the website focused on her here:

I've posted more about the Bauhaus and modernism here:

7 comments:

  1. Beautiful art for a time when woman were supposed to make things for the home.

    Debbie

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  2. Thanks for introducing me to Gunta and her amazing art.

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  3. Great post, and the link to online illustrations of her art is very good, I ordered the book you mention and found a couple more on women and Bauhaus. We tend to forget that we are still in the modernist period in the visual arts, that is, centered in all forms of abstraction (including earthworks).

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  4. I bought a book on her about 6 months ago. It's diary entries, accompanied by artwork from the same time period. Very good read.

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  5. P.S. on my comment, one of the books called BAUHAUS WOMEN: ART HANDICRAFT AND DESIGN, just arrived, including a knock-out section called WOMEN-WEAVERS. Lots of large and exquisite color illustrations. The women included in the Weaver's section are these — Benita Otte, Gunta Stolzl, Anni Albers, Gertrud Arndt and Otti Berger. Good returns at Google came up for all of them.

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  6. Thank you for info for Gunta Stolzl, I was born in Germany and her work is amazing. I have quite a few German blog friends and I can see how Gunta works influenzed them.

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