Lesley Jackson - Selvedge Magazine, Issue 11, 2006

The article 'Standard Bearer, Gunta Stolzl and the Bauhaus' was published in issue 11, 2006, of Selvedge Magazine, pages 56-59 on the occasion of the exhibition Modernism, Designing A New World in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

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Textile aficionados may be a little disappointed at the paucity of fabrics in the V&A’s Modernism show. But one individual whose contribution is recognised is the weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983) – a pivotal figure at the Bauhaus and in the history of the Modern Movement.

Stölzl initially studied at Munich School of Arts and Crafts from 1914-16, but then spent a couple of years working as a volunteer Red Cross Nurse in a field hospital during the First World War. In 1919 she resumed her studies at the newly established Bauhaus in Weimar, having been inspired by Walter Gropius’s rousing prospectus, which promised to break down the barriers between art and craft, and to treat female students on equal terms with men. Rebellious and idealistic by nature – an ‘independent spirit’, according to her youngest daughter, Monika Stadler (in a recent email) - Stölzl was excited by the prospect of developing her skills as a painter in a free and unconstrained environment. The Bauhaus was certainly radical and revolutionary from an artistic point of view, although in reality it proved much less democratic than it purported to be. The number of women students was capped and those who were admitted were forcibly channelled in the direction of textiles - much to Stölzl’s disappointment initially, although she soon warmed to the medium.

All Bauhaus students had to complete the free-ranging, mind-expanding Vorkurs or Preliminary Course (forerunner of the foundation course, later adopted in the UK), before entering a specialist workshop. Each workshop was headed up by a Formmeister or Master of Form, an artist whose role was to nurture the students’ creative development, rather than to teach them practical skills. Stölzl’s tutor on the Vorkurs and, by a stroke of good fortune, her first Formmeister in the weaving workshop, was the artist Johannes Itten. A mystic whose taste in religion (Zoroastrianism) was as unconventional as his approach to teaching, Itten had a profound influence on Stölzl. His theory of elementary forms – centred on the circle, the square and the triangle – and his preoccupation with primary colours, are reflected in some of Stölzl’s designs, particularly a red, yellow and blue jacquard-woven silk and cotton damask wall-hanging featuring circular motifs from 1926-7, a highlight of the Modernism show.

Itten also alerted Stölzl to the other sensory qualities of textiles, particularly their potential as a vehicle for textural effects. One of Itten’s ploy for cultivating tactile awareness was to encourage his students to handle yarns, cloth and other materials with their eyes closed, then to visualise their physical impressions through sketches or collages. Heightened sensitivity to texture remained a distinctive feature of Stölzl’s textiles throughout her career, manifesting itself not only in her imaginative and often unusual combinations of yarns, but in the lively and varied weave structures of her tapestries. Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923, but Stölzl found him so inspirational that, after completing her examinations, she moved to Switzerland for nine months the following year to assist him in setting up the Ontos weaving workshops at Herrliberg, near Zürich. In 1925, however, she returned to the Bauhaus to teach. Two years later she was officially appointed head of the workshop (the only female Master at the school), a post she held until 1931.

The other artist who made a decisive impression on Stölzl at the Bauhaus was Paul Klee, who became something of a guru to students in the weaving workshop. Drawing parallels with music, Klee stressed the importance of rhythm and movement in textile design, the need to engender a sense of dynamism and depth, even in apparently simple flat striped patterns. It was Klee who opened Stölzl’s eyes to the complex visual relationships within the colour spectrum, the way different colours interact or harmonise with each other. The vibrancy and complexity of Stölzl’s rugs and tapestries in terms of colour and composition can be interpreted as a direct response to Klee’s teaching. However, her work was never remotely derivative. Her exquisite design drawings, brilliantly executed in vivid, flowing watercolour, and her surviving textiles, attest to Stölzl’s abundant talent. ‘Design honesty’ and ‘design originality’ were her mother’s mottoes, according to Monika Stadler. Her tapestries and rugs exude energy, while her artwork is, quite literally, a work of art.

Yet, while the artistic side of the Bauhaus education system quickly bore fruit, the quality of technical tuition left much to be desired. When Stölzl arrived she discovered a room full of looms, but no one on the staff who knew how to use them. The first students, therefore, basically had to teach themselves, and it was the feisty Stölzl who took the lead in this. ‘Everything technical – how the loom works, the different styles of weaving, how to thread – we had to learn by trial and error. For us poor self-taught students there was a lot of guesswork and not a few tears,’ she later recalled in the magazine Werk in 1968. Idealistic yet pragmatic, Stölzl and fellow student Benita Otte realised after a while that lack of technical proficiency would seriously hinder their development. From 1922 onwards, therefore, they took the initiative to attend specialised dyeing and weaving courses in the textile-manufacturing city of Krefeld, acquiring valuable knowledge which they were then able to disseminate at the Bauhaus.

After returning to the Bauhaus in 1925 following the school’s relocation to its new purpose-designed premises in Dessau, Stölzl approached her role as teacher with great energy and enthusiasm, completely revamping the syllabus, establishing new dyeing facilities and introducing a much wider range of looms (including shaft and jacquard looms, and a carpet knotting frame). The weaving studio was divided into teaching and production zones and, in addition, Stölzl enlisted the services of a master weaver, Kurt Wanke, to deal with technical matters. Writing in the Bauhaus journal in 1931, she outlined her philosophy as an educationalist: ‘The aim of the general education was to loosen up the student and to provide him (sic) with the broadest possible base and with a direction for a systematic approach to his work.’

While Stölzl herself continued to specialise in hand-loom weaving, she recognised the importance of equipping students to design for industry. At Dessau, increasingly, this was the policy, especially after Walter Gropius was succeeded as director by Hannes Meyer, an architect with Marxist inclinations. From 1927 onwards, at Meyer’s instigation, there was a decided shift of emphasis away from one-off tapestries and hand-knotted rugs (now decried as self-indulgent and bourgeois) in favour of woven furnishing and upholstery fabrics suitable for machine-production. Stölzl, however, remained firmly committed to the practice of developing prototypes by hand. ‘Upholstery fabric, being fixed in space and being confined to a specific purpose, should have an attractive textural surface effect,’ she wrote in the Bauhaus journal, Offset, in 1926. ‘Only work at the hand loom allows the kind of latitude for an idea to be developed from experiment to experiment, until is it is defined and clarified to the point that sample products can be handed to industry for mechanical reproduction.’

The new focus on design for production was also prompted by economic necessity. The Bauhaus was desperately short of funds and it relied on royalties from designs produced under licence by manufacturers to keep it afloat. Textiles – such as a range of fabrics produced by the Berlin firm Polytex - emerged as the one of the most successful and lucrative areas of Bauhaus design from a commercial point of view.

While Stölzl worked tirelessly to further the school’s endeavours in the development of ‘utility materials’, on a personal level she was understandably reluctant to renounce hand-weaving and her interest in aesthetics. Throughout her years at the Bauhaus she continued to design and make unique pieces. ‘Tapestries and wall hangings are not commodities,’ she declared in 1926. ‘Other standards apply to these; they belong in the area of free artistic expression.’ Later, in 1931, she spoke of the importance of ‘speculative experimentation with materials, form and colour in tapestries and rugs.’ Over the years her resistance led to a growing ideological split between Stölzl and some of her more zealous colleagues. In spite of her heroic efforts in developing the weaving workshop, latterly Stölzl was subjected to an unpleasant politically motivated campaign. Eventually the pressure became too intense and in September 1931 she resigned. The Bauhaus itself only lasted another couple of years before being shut down by the Nazis in 1933.

Forced into exile from Germany (her first husband was Jewish), Stölzl made a new life for herself in Zürich and remained in Switzerland until her death in 1983. Although small in stature, she was mentally and physically tough – ‘a fighting person’, in the words of her older daughter, Yael Aloni. In 1931 Stölzl teamed up with with two ex-Bauhaus students, Gertrud Preiswerk and Heinrich-Otto Hürlimann, to establish a hand-loom weaving mill called S-P-H-Stoffe. After this folded in 1937, she set up a company called Handweberei Flora, which she ran for the next thirty years until 1967, producing hand-woven fabrics for curtains, upholstery, wall-coverings and fashion, as well as knotted and woven rugs. Revelling in the type of intricate, technically experimental effects that are impossible to reproduce by machine, Stölzl’s post-Bauhaus textiles were extremely inventive, often incorporating hand-spun yarns and unusual materials such as cellophane. During the 1950s Stölzl took up tapestry weaving again.

In spite of the shabby treatment she received at the Bauhaus, Stölzl retained an affection for the school, particularly during its joyful, wild, free-spirited early days, and she kept in touch with many ex-Bauhäuslers, such as Anni Albers and Benita Otte. ‘She often made fun of people who in her eyes “sanctified” the Bauhaus,’ recalls Monika Stadler, ‘but she remembered this exciting time in her life with great fondness.’ Although she mocked the idea of over-glamorising the Bauhaus, Stölzl knew the real value of her achievements as an artist and a teacher. ‘Weaving was what interested her most because she considered it the most essential, basic textile process,’ concludes Stadler.

Stölzl’s work has an enduring modernity that appeals to present-day taste. Enthusiasts include Matthew Bourne and Christopher Farr, who have recently issued a second collection of limited edition knotted and flatweave rugs based on Stölzl’s hitherto unrealised designs. Bourne singles out ‘her unparalleled use of colour and her uncompromising approach’ as the features that appeal to him most in terms of carpet design. ‘She produced beautiful rugs that stand on their own as works of art, yet at the same time enhance most decorative schemes.’ Like the first collection, which was launched at the RIBA in 2000, the new rugs draw on original artwork in museum archives, including the V&A. ‘Frankly we were spoilt for choice!’ says Bourne. Now Habitat, who are sponsoring the Modernism exhibition, are also getting in on the act. They have produced a budget version of a Stölzl rug costing a mere £250 to coincide with the show.

‘Woven fabrics in a room are equally important in the larger entity of architecture as the colour of the walls, the furniture and household equipment,’ declared Stölzl in 1931. With their arresting and exhilarating compositions, bold manipulation of geometric forms and confident handling of colour, Stölzl’s tapestries and carpets are just as innovative as the ground-breaking Modernist abstract paintings of the 1920s. Indeed Stölzl herself believed that the fine and applied arts, at their best, were equal in creative terms: ‘A Rembrandt and a beautiful Persian carpet have equal artistic merit,’ she observed.

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Lesley Jackson

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Author’s note: I am indebted to Gunta Stölzl’s daughters, Monika Stadler and Yael Aloni, for their personal insights and assistance in preparing this article. Many thanks also to Matthew Bourne at Christopher Farr.

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Submitted to Selvedge - 27 March 2006