Gunta Stölzl

Biography

In 1931 swastikas were painted on the door of her office in Dessau. The director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, demanded her resignation, and the students responded by devoting an entire issue of the school newspaper to her, but she could not stay.

She was born Adelgunde, called Gunta by everyone, on 5 March 1897 in Munich. Her father, Franz Seraph Stölzl, was a teacher and school principal, and her mother was Kreszenz Stürzer. She had a brother, Erwin, later a lawyer. After a girls' high school she entered the School of Applied Arts in Munich in 1914 and studied glass painting, decorative arts and ceramics under Richard Riemerschmid. In 1917–1918 she served as a Red Cross nurse: by some accounts on the Isonzo and Western fronts, by others only behind the lines.

On her return she read the Bauhaus manifesto and in the summer of 1919 went to Weimar. To be accepted on probation for Johannes Itten's preliminary course, she worked in the stained-glass workshop and took mural painting classes. By 1920 she had been fully admitted and was given a scholarship.

The weaving workshop was then regarded as the “women's department”, and its head, Georg Muche, by all accounts had almost no interest in the craft. The students taught themselves technique. Stölzl passed the journeyman's examination as a weaver, took dyeing courses in Krefeld and reopened the abandoned dye studio. In 1921 she and Marcel Breuer made the African Chair: a painted wooden frame with a colourful woven back and seat. In 1921–1922 she made fabrics for the Sommerfeld House, designed by Walter Gropius. At the first Bauhaus exhibition in September 1923 the workshop showed rugs and wall hangings for the Haus am Horn, and the reviews were favourable.

In the mid-1920s she left for a time to help Itten set up the Ontos weaving workshops in Herrliberg, near Zurich. In 1925, as the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, she returned as the workshop's technical director. She was formally given the rank of junior master only in 1927, but by then both the organisation and the content of the work were in her hands. Muche left the school on 31 March 1927, and from then on she was responsible for everything. She was helped by Anni Albers, Otti Berger and Benita Otte.

Dessau had looms of different kinds and a good dye shop. Stölzl changed the workshop's vocabulary, moving from pictorial textiles towards industrial design. Students studied the mechanics of weaving, dyeing, mathematics and geometry; threads were tested for colour, texture, resistance to wear, flexibility, light reflection and sound absorption. They tried cellophane and artificial silk. In 1930 she issued the first diplomas of the weaving workshop and organised the first joint project between the Bauhaus and the Berlin firm Polytex, which wove and sold the fabrics. In 1931 an article of hers on the development of the workshop appeared in the school's journal. About a hundred bedspreads for the bed alcoves of the “Prellerhaus”, the Bauhaus students' residence in Dessau, were also made then; none survives, only photographs.

In 1928 she travelled to Moscow, and in 1929 she married the architect Arieh Sharon, a Bauhaus student, and as a result lost her German citizenship. Their daughter Yael was born on 8 October 1929.

After leaving in October 1931 she moved to Switzerland and in Zurich, together with Gertrud Preiswerk and Heinrich Otto Hürlimann, also Bauhaus graduates, opened a hand-weaving workshop, S-P-H Stoffe. Business went badly, and it closed in 1933. From 1932 Stölzl was a member of the Swiss Werkbund, in 1934 its magazine “Das Werk” profiled her, and in the same year she received a major commission: curtains for a Zurich cinema. In 1935 she opened S&H Stoffe with Hürlimann, and from 1937 she ran the workshop Handweberei Flora alone. In 1936 her marriage to Sharon ended. In 1942 she married the writer Willy Stadler and became a Swiss citizen, and in 1943 her daughter Monika was born.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, bought her work. In 1967 she closed the workshop and devoted herself only to tapestries made from her own designs, weaving in yarn, bast, stones and glass beads. In the same year the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired her designs and samples.

Gunta Stölzl died on 22 April 1983 in Männedorf, near Zurich.