The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic's Premier Art Institute, 1919-1932

By Anja Baumhoff. Peter Lang,
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2001.
187 pages. Paper, $37.95.
ISBN 3-63-137945-5.

As reviewed by R. Roger Remington,
Department of Graphic Design,
College of Imaging Arts and Sciences,
Rochester Institute of Technology,
73 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester NY
14623-5603.

rrrfad@rit.edu.

The author of this new, interesting book on the Bauhaus (the famous German design school) is a cultural historian who studied at the Universities of Freiburg (Germany) and Oxford (England), and then earned a PhD at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The first two chapters are a thorough yet concise account of all three phases of the school (in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin), with historical material interwoven with the issue of gender inequality, which is the book's primary subject. The author provides a chronology of the women who played significant roles at the school as teachers, technicians, assistants and students, with the result that the book is an overview of how women were treated at the Bauhaus. Gender stereotyping and male dominance were commonplace in the 1920s, and the Bauhaus was no exception. Like the rest of society, it was largely a "man's world," and was administered in a way that preserved those attitudes. The school's founder (Walter Gropius) and its master teachers (mostly male) were all but oblivious to the messy, complex problem of the unequal treatment of genders, a major contributive factor to which was the inferior status afforded to ?craft,? as distinct from ?art,? a division that widened substantially at the end of the Middle Ages. Bauhaus women were assigned to the craft workshops (ceramics, metals and textiles), but not to the more elite art areas. Baumhoff concedes that, in the school's development, there was more freedom and opportunity given to women during its initial phase at Weimar than at Dessau, when the categorical boundaries became even more rigid. Baumhoff offers a fascinating and persuasive argument, adroitly supporting her narrative with meaningful quotes and a wealth of specific examples.

 (Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, Spring 2003.)