Silenced Talented Women's

Women's that made history on the shadow

As the world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the legendary German art school, its rarely recognized female trailblazers step further into the spotlight.

The Bauhaus school of art and design was conceived in the early 20th century as part of a goal to rebuild society following the First World War. Founded by architect Walter Gropius in the central German city of Weimar, the school’s central philosophy championed innovative design that merged avant-garde aesthetics with functionality. The university only operated in Germany for a brief 14 years between 1919 and 1933, eventually caving to pressures from the Nazi regime, which criticized the school’s progressive curriculum. But 100 years later, the Bauhaus continues to be widely celebrated as the institution from which the pioneers of modernism emerged (and never moreso than this year, as Germany commemorates the school’s centennial with new museums, events, and exhibitions across the country). A lesser-known part of the art school’s lasting legacy, however, is that during its time, the Bauhaus was one of very few academic institutions to accept female students.

The often-overlooked women of the Bauhaus

In the school’s founding manifesto, Gropius stated that “any person of good repute” could attend the Bauhaus based on his or her talent, “without regard to age or sex.” When Gropius opened the Weimar school in 1919, women—who had just earned fundamental voting rights in the Weimar constitution—outnumbered men in the class by 84 to 79. Throughout the 1920s, the title Bauhausmädels (“Bauhaus girls”) came to represent the growing population of contemporary women in Germany who pursued their own professional futures with active disregard for traditional gender roles. But despite the Bauhaus’s willingness to present women in art and design with new opportunities, various boundaries still remained in place for the university’s female students. While male students were encouraged to take classes in sculpture, furniture design, graphic design, metalwork, and architecture, female students were usually steered toward weaving or ceramics courses under the program directors’ insistence that physically demanding workshops were unsuitable for women. To this day, many of the Bauhaus’s most famous names—among them Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Paul Klee—are men who studied and taught at the university. But some of the university’s most trailblazing (yet least recognized) contributors were women. As Germany commemorates the 100th anniversary of the boundary-pushing art school, a new book titled Bauhausmädels: A Tribute to Pioneering Women Artists highlights the forward-thinking women who contributed to the Bauhaus’s lasting legacy. With almost 400 portraits taken between 1919 and 1933, the visual book spotlights 87 female artists from the Bauhaus, highlighting their incredible artistic accomplishments and individual persistence in the face of gender inequality. (The book, written by German historian Patrick Rössler, will be published by Taschen on May 29 in the United States.) Here are a few of the important female artists who helped carve the Bauhaus into history. Read on to learn where you can see their works throughout the year in Germany.