Bauhaus women photographers step out of the shadows in Berlin
A new exhibition in Berlin is revising one of modernism’s most persistent simplifications: that women at the Bauhaus were largely steered toward weaving. At the Museum für Fotografie, New Woman, New Vision: Women Photographers of the Bauhaus brings together around 300 photographs by 29 photographers connected to the Bauhaus and the later New Bauhaus in Chicago, offering a broader view of how women shaped the school’s visual culture.
Kristin Bartels, curator and head of collection for visual arts and photography at Berlin’s Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung, says the familiar story has been too narrow. While figures such as Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl have long been recognized for textile work, Bartels argues that many women also studied architecture and photography, fields that have received less attention in the Bauhaus narrative.
Photography was central to the school long before formal instruction began in 1929. It served as a tool for documenting objects, buildings, and people, but it also developed into an artistic medium in its own right. The exhibition traces that history through work by Lucia Moholy, who was photographing Bauhaus subjects as early as 1923, and whose images were often overshadowed by, or even credited to, her husband, the Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy. Her photographs in the show include portraits of the activist Clara Zetkin and the student Eva Weininger, as well as a view of the Dessau campus designed by Walter Gropius.
The exhibition also restores attention to Ise Gropius, long nicknamed “Mrs. Bauhaus,” whose photographs were similarly eclipsed by her husband’s reputation. Other artists represented include Ellen Auerbach, Elsa Thiemann, Gertrud Arndt, Florence Henri, Marianne Brandt, and Margarete Dambeck-Keller, some of whom continued working in photography after their Bauhaus years, while others are better known for work in different media.
The show also includes new work by contemporary artists Kalinka Gieseler, Caroline Kynast, and Sinta Werner, each invited to respond to the historic photographs. For the Bauhaus-Archiv, which Bartels describes as home to the world’s largest collection dedicated to the Bauhaus, the exhibition is also an act of recovery. Many of the artists left their life’s work in the archive before they were fully recognized, giving curators a rare opportunity to bring overlooked figures — especially women — back into view.
New Woman, New Vision: Women Photographers of the Bauhaus is on view at Museum für Fotografie in Berlin from April 17 to October 4.
