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”
In a way, it was inevitable. 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 was considered the best weaver among the Bauhäuslers for her work as a colorist and also for her rug-making (one of her creations was in Walter Gropius’ office from 1924) but her subversive creativity emerged in her highly theatrical, almost campy portrait photography, which she took up out of boredom after giving up weaving. One of her main muses was fellow weaver Otti Berger, who owned a trunk full of costumes and fabrics. The result of this collaboration is a series of portraits of Berger, where, in stark opposition to the Neue Frau aesthetic, she interprets various characters, such as a clown, or a Spanish lady. Arndt’s other muse was herself. The series called “Mask Photos” consists of a series of self-portraits where Arndt adorns herself in heavy makeup, costumes, and veils, interpreting, in a camp fashion, feminine tropes such as the widow, the socialite, and the little girl. “It struck me how, in those photographs she was almost smothering herself in fabric, the material she renounced,” says Otto. She wears no masks to speak of, but uses her face and body as a canvas for outlandish outfits, heavy makeup, and distorted facial expressions. Through these photos, argues Otto, Arndt removes herself from the future-and-efficiency-oriented philosophy of the Bauhaus, existing instead in a present that is “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, an American-born a concert pianist. After she enrolled in the Bauhaus in 1927 she discovered photography as a primary medium. In particular female-centric photography that encompassed queerness and erotica. A 1928 portrait of her partner Margarete Schall, sees her reflected in a mirror, sporting a “boyish charm”. Margarete wears modest, masculine clothes. She has a close-cropped haircut and, holding a cigarette, appears lost in thought. Her erotic photography combined the ideal of neue Frau with elements of bondage and fetishism. One of them portrays the famed fashion designer, photographer and essayist Ré Soupault. Posing with her eyes closed, reclining nude on a soft white ground. Another one, dated 1934, sees a lithe woman in the nude. Her waist accentuated by a belt, as if she were dressed up for an erotic game. Her gaze appears downcast, but not in a submissive way. Henri’s female models were both sensual and self-possessed. They hardly sported coy, or come-hither looks. Rather, their gaze is averted suggesting they’re 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.”