Gunta Stölzl

Gunta Stölzl (5 March 1897 – 22 April 1983) was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school's weaving workshop, where she created enormous change as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She was one of a small number of female teachers on the Bauhaus' staff and the first to hold the title of "Master".

Her textile work is thought to typify the distinctive style of Bauhaus textiles. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1919, became a junior master in 1927. She was dismissed for political reasons in 1931, two years before the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis.

The textile department was a neglected part of the Bauhaus when Stölzl began her career, and its active masters were weak on the technical aspects of textile production. She soon became a mentor to other students and reopened the Bauhaus dye studios in 1921. After a brief departure, Stölzl became the school's weaving director in 1925 when it relocated from Weimar to Dessau and expanded the department to increase its weaving and dyeing facilities. She applied ideas from modern art to weaving, experimented with synthetic materials, and improved the department's technical instruction to include courses in mathematics. The Bauhaus weaving workshop became one of its most successful facilities under her direction.

Early life Stölzl was born in Munich, Bavaria to Franz Seraph Stölzl, a teacher and school principal and Kreszenz Stürzer, whose father was friends with the reform pedagogue Georg Kerschensteiner. She had one brother, Erwin. She attended a high school for the daughters of professionals, graduating in 1913. She began her studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in 1914, where she studied glass painting, decorative arts and ceramics under the well known director Richard Riemerschmid. In 1917 Stölzl's studies were interrupted by the ongoing war and she volunteered to work as a nurse for the Red Cross, behind the front lines until the end of World War I in 1918. Upon her return home she re-immersed herself in her studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, where she participated in the school's curriculum reform. It was during this time that Stölzl encountered the Bauhaus manifesto. Having decided to continue her studies at the newly formed Bauhaus school, Stölzl spent the summer of 1919 in the glass workshop and mural painting classes of the Bauhaus to earn her trial acceptance into Johannes Itten’s preliminary course. By 1920, Stölzl had not only been fully accepted into the Bauhaus school, but had received a scholarship to attend.

Student life

Within Stölzl’s first year at the Bauhaus, she began what she referred to as the “women’s department”, which due to the underlying gender roles within the school, eventually became synonymous with the weaving workshop.

In 1921 Stölzl and two of her friends made a trip to Italy to view the art and architecture they had studied for further inspiration. After passing her journeyman's examination as a weaver and taking courses in textile dyeing at a school in Krefeld, Stölzl was able to reopen the previously abandoned dye studios. It was becoming obvious that she was giving direction to the other students, though unofficially, as neither Muche, the form master nor Helene Börner, the crafts master, could really teach and promote the students in technical aspects. In 1921, Stölzl collaborated with Marcel Breuer on the African Chair – made of painted wood with a colorful textile weave. The first official Bauhaus exhibition took place in September 1923 in the Haus am Horn building. The building itself, primarily designed by Georg Muche, was a simplistic, highly modern cube structure made largely of steel and concrete. Each room of the house was designed around its specific function and had specially made furniture, hardware etc., which had been produced in the Bauhaus workshops. The weaving workshop participated by creating rugs, wall hangings and other objects for various rooms all of which won favorable reviews. With this exhibition, Walter Gropius released an essay titled ‘Art and Technology – A New Unity' which seemed to have a great impact on the women of the weaving workshop. Despite the favorable reviews of their works, the women began to move away from the pictorial imagery and traditional methods they had been working with up to this point and began working abstractly, attempting to make objects more in line with Kandinsky’s teachings of the ‘inner self’.

Stözl's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.