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Women of the Bauhaus: Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (1899 –1944)

As we conclude Women’s History Month, we will reflect on the life and work of Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, who enjoyed an unusual career of furniture and toy design at the Bauhaus. It is noteworthy to consider that the women at the Bauhaus began their artistic careers at the moment when German women earned the right to vote for the first time in January 1919.

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (1899 –1944)

Preliminary designs for a children’s room interior by Alma Buscher. Courtesy WikiCommons.

Alma Buscher could not know that her early art studies would lead to the field of furniture-making and toy design and a deep interest in child pedagogy. By the time the artist enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922, she had attended several art schools, including the State Arts and Crafts Museum in Berlin. At the Bauhaus, she took the preliminary course taught by Johannes Itten and attended classes by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, as was standard. She became one of only a few women who continued in an area other than weaving when her teachers Georg Muche and Josef Hartwig supported her move into the wood sculpture program.

In 1923 Ms. Buscher’s furniture designs were shown in the school’s first exhibit in the Haus am Horn – the first example of a building based on Bauhaus design principles – and included furniture designed for the children’s room, as well as toys and a puppet theater. What was unique about the artist’s furnishings – such as the cabinets she designed – was that they encouraged children to explore space on their own and rearrange the brightly painted crates that were part of the cabinets in any way they wished. She incorporated the element of movement when she added wheels to the crates, allowing children to further create and pursue their own narratives.

“Children should, if at all possible, have a room in which they can be what they want to be…everything in it belongs to them and their imagination designs it …”
– Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, 1926

Shipbuilding toy (left) designed by Alma Buscher. Courtesy WikiCommons.

Only a year later, the Zeiss kindergarten was outfitted with children’s furniture designed by Ms. Buscher. Her furniture and toys were exhibited at a conference for kindergarten teachers and youth leaders, as well as the “Youth Welfare in Thuringia” exhibit in Weimar. In 1926, her designs were shown at “The Toy” exhibit in Nurnberg.

Children’s furniture designed by Alma Buscher, donated to the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar. Courtesy picture-alliance/dpa.

Her most popular toy designs were the Kleine Schiffbauspiel (“Little Shipbuilding Game”) and the Groβe Schiffbauspiel (“Big Shipbuilding Game”), small brightly painted wooden blocks that could be constructed and re-arranged freely. Other popular toys were her simple colorful building blocks and her Wurfpuppen (or “Throw Dolls,” dolls made of straw and with bead heads) and coloring books. In 1927, she designed crane and sailboat cut-out kits, published by Otto Maier-Verlag in Ravensburg. The shipbuilding games and cut-out kits were reintroduced into production in 1977.

Journalists view toys, including some designed by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher at the commemorative “Collection of the Bauhaus” exhibit at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. Courtesy of picture-alliance/dpa.

Ms. Buscher married her fellow Bauhaus student, actor and dancer Werner Siedhoff who worked closely with Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus stage. The couple moved to Dessau when the school relocated there in 1925. Two years later she graduated from the school and worked there for a year. Because of her husband’s line of work, the family – which by then included a son, Joost, and a daughter, Lore – moved frequently. She performed freelance work after leaving the Bauhaus and died in an air-raid in 1944.

Haus am Horn, part of the Bauhaus UNESCO World Heritage Site. Courtesy picture-alliance/dpa

In 2004, the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar opened a solo exhibition, “Alma Siehoff-Buscher: A New World for Children” which traveled to the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin in 2006. The Haus am Horn as part of the Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau/Berlin is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is scheduled to reopen in May 2019 after extensive renovations to return it to its original appearance.

By Eva Santorini, German Embassy

Comprehensive information on the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus can be viewed at bauhaus100.com.

Women of the Bauhaus: Lucia Moholy (1894-1989)

Lucia Moholy, photograph by László Moholy-Nagy.
Courtesy picture alliance-Liszt Collection

Lucia Schulz was born in 1894 in Prague. As a young woman, she studied philosophy and art history at the University of Prague, but then turned her focus on publishing, working as an editor in German publishing houses. In 1920 she met a Hungarian artist, László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin whom she married a year later.

While her husband took over the preliminary course from Josef Albers at the Bauhaus in 1923, Ms. Moholy became her husband’s darkroom technician and collaborator, exploring new techniques such as photogram, the process of exposing light-sensitive paper with objects laid upon it. She used a new focus, referred to as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which employed a straightforward frontality. She took many photographs of the school exterior and interior and social events which were extensively used to advertise the school in brochures, posters and magazine articles.

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Women of the Bauhaus: Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983)

Even as a young girl, Adelgunde Stölzl carried her sketchbook everywhere. On long hikes in the mountains around her hometown of Munich, she sketched landscapes and farmers with their livestock. The young artist would continue that discipline throughout her life, and her accompanying writings served as a valuable insight into her creative mind. She continued her love of the arts as a young woman at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts), where she studied decorative and glass painting, ceramics, and art history. Even as a nurse during World War I, she filled the pages of her journals while serving on the Italian and French fronts.

Upon her return from the war, Gunta Stölzl, as she was then known, decided to apply to the Bauhaus, whose non-traditional ideals of openness and exploration she found intriguing. However, she soon realized that women were not welcome in all classes and often relegated to what was considered “women’s art:” weaving. There, she had soon mastered the fundamentals of weaving and began teaching other students, enjoying intense collaboration with others. Students sometimes supplemented learning weaving and dyeing techniques outside the school but were motivated by the open and fruitful dialogue of the Bauhaus setting.

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Women of the Bauhaus: Anni Albers (1899-1994)

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are launching a series introducing influential women of the Bauhaus movement – a movement that is also celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

Elevating Craft to Art

“Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.” – Anni Albers

Anni Albers, ca. 1929–33 © 2019 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

On its 100^th anniversary, you may hear much of the Bauhaus, the iconic German art school which had its beginning in Dessau, Germany in 1919 under the leadership of Walter Gropius and which bridged the gap between fine and applied art. You might have read of the Gesamtkunstwerk concept (complete work of art) which the school embraced. You may be familiar with the international artists who taught alongside German artists: Wassily Kandinsky (Russian), Paul Klee (Swiss), Lyonel Feininger (American) and others. You might know that after its dissolution in 1933, some of the Bauhaus staff emigrated elsewhere: Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer continued their work in Chicago; Walter Gropius taught at Harvard; and Bauhaus-trained Jewish students designed apartments for the “White City” in Tel Aviv.

What you may not have heard of are the women of the Bauhaus.

Although the Bauhaus “welcomed any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex,” women were excluded from some disciplines. Disappointed that she could not enroll in the school’s stained glass class after fulfilling her core coursework, Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann enrolled in the weaving class which was open to female students. She quickly mastered the technical aspects of weaving, pushed the traditional boundaries, and began experimenting with traditional and non-traditional methods and materials. Her innate curiosity of traditional and newly-developed materials allowed her to break free from accepted norms and pushed her creativity into new directions. Drawings and designs from those years often show randomly-placed color shapes inspired by the artist’s visits to the opera.

“There were so few chances to execute a stained glass window…So the only thing that was open to me was the weaving workshop. And I thought that was rather sissy…once I got started I got rather intrigued with the possibilities there.” – Anni Albers in a 1968 interview with Sevim Fesci, Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art.

Anni Albers, Design for a 1926 unexecuted wallhanging, n.d.
Gouache with pencil on reprographic paper. 15 1/8 x 9 7/8 in. (38.1x 25 cm)
© 2019 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art

The young student married Josef Albers, who had risen to Junior Master at the school, in 1925 and took over the weaving department in 1931 after the departure of its head, Gunta Stölzl. In her new position, she taught weaving and design and continued to experiment with geometric designs and non-traditional materials such as horsehair, jute, paper, metallic thread, artificial silk, and cellophane.

In 1929, Anni Albers accepted a unique challenge when she was asked to correct the inadequate acoustics of the Bauhaus auditorium. She studied the properties of materials traditionally used for sound suppression such as velvet and experimented with new kinds of synthetic fibers. By attaching light-reflective cellophane to sound-absorbing cotton and chenille on the back, she won acclaim for her innovative and effective solution which could be mass-produced and which furthered innovation in theater design.

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