Marta Breuer

Marta Magdalena Elisabeth Erps-Breuer ( Erps; September 29, 1902 - June 14, 1977) was a German artist, scientific illustrator and insect researcher. After training at Bauhaus, she worked in Brazil.

Biography Marta Magdalena Elisabeth Erps was born in Frankfurt, Germany, the daughter of Friedrich A. M. Erps and Auguste Mathilde J. Erps.

Erps studied at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1924, where she became a friend of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. By the time she entered, weaving was the only area of studies that remained open to women students after their first year of foundation courses. As a student in the weaving workshop under Georg Muche and Gunta Stölzl, Erps participated in the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 with a geometric textile in the Haus am Horn, which is now a World Heritage Site. The rug itself has been lost, but its general design (known from photographs) is shown in outline on the floor of the room where it was placed for the exhibition. In addition to textiles and drawings, she created sculptures, paintings, and wood carvings, few of which have survived. She published descriptions of nine species in these two genuses, five of them with Pavan. In the 1960s, she named several new species of Rhynchosciara, one of which, Rhynchosciara baschanti, honors Rudolf Baschant, an artist and botanical specimen collector who had also been at the Bauhaus in the 1920s.

She officially retired in 1966 but continued working informally for several more years before her death in 1977 in São Paulo. A carved wooden model of Drosophila melanogaster created by Erps-Breuer is still kept in the archives of the university's Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology, along with her notebooks and some drawings. Her surviving drawings still stand out to other scientists as exceptionally accurate and skillfully drawn.