Gertrud Grunow

Gertrud Grunow (8 July 1870 – 11 June 1944) was a German musician and educationalist who formulated theories on the relationships between sound, colour and movement and was a specialist in vocal pedagogy. She taught courses in the "theory of harmonisation" at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she was the school's first woman teacher and the only woman teacher during the school's Weimar years.

Life and work

Grunow was born in Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia on 8 July 1870. She began exploring the relationships between sound, colour and movement as early as 1914 and gave her first lectures on her theories in Berlin in 1919. Later that year she was invited by the Swiss painter and designer Johannes Itten, to teach at the Bauhaus, where he was a master.

She began teaching a course in the "theory of harmony", later called the "theory of harmonisation", at the Bauhaus from the end of 1919, and remained at the school until the summer of 1924. Unlike her male colleagues, she was paid on a freelance fee basis and was not taken on as a contracted employee until the summer of 1923. Both masters and students attended her courses.

Grunow, along with Itten, Lothar Schreyer and others, was regarded as one of the Bauhaus 'esoterics', as opposed to the more technically-minded school director Walter Gropius. Once Itten had left in 1923, she lost her influence and she left the school the following year.

Grunow collaborated in research with the psychologist Heinz Werner, and was an associate of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the art historian Gertrud Bing and Hilla von Rebay, who was an abstract artist and the first director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

She moved to London with the Warburg Institute, but had to return to Germany at the start World War II. She lived in Düsseldorf from 1939 to 1944. She died in Leverkusen in 1944. She is buried in Bonn.