Women's Work

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and other male leaders of the famous interwar German art school steered women applicants into the weaving workshop because they considered textiles to be ``women's work.'' With designs ranging from severely geometrical to riotously colorful, weavers like Gunta Stolzl, Benita Otte, Anni Albers and Marli Ehrman made the Bauhaus workshop an innovative laboratory which set standards for textile production worldwide. After the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, its weavers dispersed to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to California's Pond Farm Community and to the New Bauhaus established in Chicago by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Their legacy of free experimentation led to a rebirth of handweaving in the U.S. Beautifully written and illustrated, this study unearths a major chapter in Bauhaus history. Weltge is an art history professor at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. (Nov.)