The Bauhaus Promised Equality in 1919. By 1920 the Women Were in the Weaving Workshop.

The Bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1919 with a manifesto that admitted "any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex" — an unusually direct promise for a German art school at the time. In its first year more women applied than men. Within about a year the school had created a separate women's class and folded it into the textile workshop, and weaving became, in practice, where women went. The strange part of the story is what they did once they got there.

The promise, and how quickly it was managed

Walter Gropius wrote the equality clause and meant it as a recruiting position. What he had not planned for was the response: the applications skewed female, and Gropius grew concerned that a school seen as full of women would not be taken seriously by the industry partners and municipal funders he needed. The number of women admitted was quietly limited.

Gropius also held, and argued openly, a theory that men thought in three dimensions while women could manage only two — a tidy justification for steering female students towards flat work: textiles, and away from architecture, metal and cabinetmaking.

In 1920, Gunta Stölzl proposed a women's department. Gropius agreed, and accounts of the period are blunt that he agreed for his own reasons: a separate class made it far easier to keep women out of the other workshops. The women's class was absorbed into textiles, and the loom became the default.

The workshop nobody wanted became the one that paid

Here is the part that gets left out of the potted version. The weaving workshop was under-resourced from the start. Stölzl remembered Gropius pointing the weavers towards "various old ladies in Weimar from whom we could beg for leftover fabric, and thread, lace, veils, little pearl bags, leather, and furs" — a school of the machine age, sending its women out to cadge scraps.

They took it seriously anyway, and treated cloth as an engineering problem rather than a decorative one: fibre behaviour, light reflectance, sound absorption, wear. By the Dessau years the weaving workshop was the most commercially successful department in the school. The Bauhaus sold licences for textile designs while the more celebrated workshops struggled to place a product.

Gunta Stölzl became the only woman ever appointed a young master at the Bauhaus — of weaving, inevitably. She ran the workshop from 1927, turned it into a proper industrial design studio, and left in 1931 after a campaign against her that mixed professional resentment with the antisemitism of the period.

Four women, and what they actually made

Anni Albers wanted glass. She was directed to weaving, called it a decision she resisted at first, and then spent fifty years arguing that thread was a serious material. In 1949 the Museum of Modern Art gave her a solo exhibition — the first it had given any textile artist.

Marianne Brandt got into the metal workshop, where the reception was cold enough that she later wrote about being handed the jobs nobody else wanted as a form of hazing. The objects she designed there are now the ones on the postcards.

The photographs you have seen, by the person you have not

Almost every canonical image of the Bauhaus — the Dessau building with its glass curtain wall, the objects shot clean against plain grounds — was taken by Lucia Moholy. She was not on the staff list as a photographer. She was married to László Moholy-Nagy, and she documented the school.

Fleeing Berlin in 1933, she left around 560 glass-plate negatives behind. Gropius took them to the United States. He used them, uncredited, including for the Bauhaus exhibition and catalogue at MoMA in 1938. Moholy spent years writing to former colleagues trying to find out where her archive had gone; she got some of it back only in the late 1950s, and only after involving a lawyer. Several plates came back broken. Roughly 330 are still missing.

The image of the Bauhaus as clean, rational and inevitable is substantially her authorship. It was reproduced for decades under other people's names.

Why the posters look the way they do

The design vocabulary of the Bauhaus — the circle, square and triangle, the primary colours, the refusal of ornament — came out of the preliminary course every student took, women included. That is the part of the school that was genuinely open.

So when you look at a Bauhaus geometric print, you are looking at a grammar that women helped build and were then largely excluded from applying at scale. It is worth knowing while it hangs on a wall.

What to do with this

If you like the Bauhaus prints, the honest follow-on is to go and look at Stölzl's textiles and Albers's wall hangings, which are in the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and MoMA's collection online. They are not posters, and they are better than most of what the school is famous for.

For a wall, the geometric work sits well in a workspace — it holds up at a glance and does not fight for attention. And if the feminist thread here is the part that interested you, the suffrage and protest prints and that history are the neighbouring room.

Sources worth your time

The Bauhaus-Archiv and the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau both publish on the women's class. Lucia Moholy's story is set out in the scholarship on her negatives and in the 2024 Kunsthalle Praha retrospective Exposures. Wikipedia's articles on Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers and Lucia Moholy are a decent starting point and cite the primary material.

Written by The VORAROSA atelier — VORAROSA is an independent poster atelier. We design and curate 196 original art prints and produce each one on demand on 250gsm museum-quality matte paper.