Bauhaus turns 100 this year
The Secret History of the Bauhaus
It is Bauhaus’ 100th birthday this year. The German art school is best known for its minimal, unadorned designs. Clean curves and geometry, it embraces the technical and the commercial. It was the quintessential movement of rational modernism. This is in direct opposition to Dada and Surrealism. Art movements around the same time, respectively, in Switzerland and in France.
Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics.
However, beneath its utilization and rigorous veneer, the Bauhaus was a fertile ground for the artistic expression of what were historically marginalized identities. Women and queer people made art expressing a range of ideas that seem at odds with the paradigm of rationality their Bauhaus institution was known for. A subject that Elizabeth Otto, a scholar specialized in the marginalized aspects of the Bauhaus institution, explores at large in her new book, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics.
Neue Frau – “New Woman”
The 1920s zeitgeist had seeped into the Bauhaus. The figure of the Neue Frau, “New Woman” embodied an idea of modern femininity that thrived during the interwar period. This “New Woman” lived in metropolitan areas. She was stereotypically associated with fast fashion, fearlessness and ruthlessness. The year 1919 also saw the establishment of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, which had its team of scientists and researchers posit that a spectrum of sexual identities and preferences and behaviors was natural to humanity pre-dating the mission of the Kinsey Institute by almost 30 years: the institute coined the term transsexualism (now an obsolete term, transgender being preferable), and pioneered gender-reassignment (now affirmation) surgeries. The aim was to educate people on sexuality, sexual health, contraception, and to facilitate women’s emancipation.
Photography
Bauhaus artists enjoyed analyzing, dissecting, or subverting, the Neue Frau stereotype and, when it comes to queer artists, their queerness is seamlessly integrated in their works. Curiously, these more “subversive” and experimental works mostly came in the form of photography, which Bauhaus artists practiced alongside other art forms.
Bauhäuslers’
Gertrud Arndt, a renowned Bauhaus weaver known for her colorist and rug-making skills, found her creative outlet in theatrical, campy portrait photography. Bored with weaving, she collaborated with fellow weaver Otti Berger, who owned a trunk of costumes and fabrics. Their portraits, starkly contrasting with the Neue Frau aesthetic, depicted Berger as various characters, such as a clown or a Spanish lady. Arndt’s self-portraits, known as “Mask Photos,” also featured heavy makeup, costumes, and veils, interpreting feminine tropes like the widow, the socialite, and the little girl. Otto noted Arndt’s self-indulgence in fabric, the material she renounced. While she wore no masks, her photos showcased her face and body as canvases for outlandish outfits, makeup, and distorted expressions. Arndt’s work challenged the Bauhaus’s future-oriented philosophy, positioning her in a present that was “blasé and ornamental.”
Queer
Max Pfeiffer Watenphul was perhaps the most notable exponent of the queer Bauhaus, as he combined Bauhaus aesthetic with “campy” imagery of gay and lesbian subcultures. Although he is mostly known as a painter who specialized in still-life subjects and had a fascination for the Mediterranean; in his photography, he embraced a grotesque aesthetic that was far from the predominant New Objectivity of the decade. “Made brilliant new photos. But people say they’re very perverted!!!?” he wrote in a letter to his friend Maria Cyrenius. “Woman with a Fan” sees a hyper-feminized subject smiling coyly played by a man in drag adorned in flowers, pearl and feathers. This piece ended up in the collection of Nazi industrialist Kurt Kirchbach.
Neue Frau Queer
Florence Henri was an American-born concert pianist. She discovered photography as her primary medium after enrolling in the Bauhaus in 1927. Her female-centric photography explored queerness and erotica. A 1928 portrait of her partner Margarete Schall reflects her in a mirror sporting a “boyish charm”. There she wears modest, masculine clothes, a close-cropped haircut, and a cigarette, lost in thought. Her erotic photography combined the ideal of Neue Frau with bondage and fetishism. This includes a portrait of a fashion designer, photographer, and essayist. Ré Soupault is posing nude with her eyes closed on a soft white ground. Another 1934 portrait shows a lithe woman in the nude. Her waist accentuated by a belt, as if dressed for an erotic game, with a downcast gaze, not submissive. Henri’s sensual and self-possessed female models avoided coy or come-hither looks. They instead avert their gaze, suggesting they were in their own thoughts.
Secret history
None of this was advertised too overtly, though. Otto explains: “The institution didn’t make any overt space available for gender experimentation in terms of representation.” “The institution signaled very broadly that it was a place of experimentation and new life. I think to young queer people that was a dream, because they knew they were looking for something else.”