When we think of women at the Bauhaus, it tends to be of dazzlingly gifted female students and teachers, like Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, and Gunta Stölzl, who conformed to the stereotype of the neue Frauen, or “new women,” of 1920s Germany. Clever, dynamic, and uninhibited, they sported dashingly short skirts and bobbed hair to signal their intent to make the most of their gender’s new freedoms. Yet one of the most powerful women at Bauhaus checked none of those boxes—Gertrud Grunow.
Far from embodying the youthful spirit of the neue Frauen, Grunow looked like their conservative aunts. This was partly due to her age. Fifty years old when she joined the Bauhaus in 1919, she was significantly older than most of her colleagues, and dressed sedately with her long white hair neatly pinned into a bun. Yet not only was Grunow the only woman to be a senior teacher in the Bauhaus’s early years, her classes, which explored the influence of sound, movement, and color on students’ creativity, were among the most radical in its history.
By the time she arrived at the Bauhaus, Grunow had devoted over a decade to research and experimentation in those fields. Born in Berlin in 1870, she began teaching in the 1890s by running relatively conventional classes for singers and musicians. But in 1908, she discovered the work of the avant-garde Swiss composer and musician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who encouraged his students to interpret music through the movement of their bodies in the belief that they would become more expressive. Grunow incorporated the principles of Dalcroze eurhythmics, as his methodology was called, and Lebensreform, a popular social reform movement influenced by spiritualism, in her teaching throughout Germany, and introduced them to the Bauhaus.
She was invited to lecture there in 1919 by the founding director, the architect Walter Gropius, after he heard her speak in Berlin. The lecture proved so successful that Grunow was appointed to teach a new course called the Theory of Harmony, albeit on a contractual basis, which meant she was paid less than her male peers.
As the Theory of Harmony was part of the six-month Foundation Course, which was compulsory for all first-year students, Grunow exerted considerable influence over their education. Not that they objected as her classes were popular. “This week we had the first rhythmic dance lessons, I like it very much,” wrote Stölzl in her diary on November 1, 1919. “The heavy mass of my body was completely dominated by the spirit.”
Grunow’s influence at the school was reinforced by her close rapport with a group of teachers known as “the esoterics,” who shared her fascination with alternative philosophies. Among them were the artists Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee and the set designer Lothar Schreyer. Intrigued by Grunow’s research into harmony, they applied her principles to their teaching and encouraged her to extend her experiments with music and movement into color. Gropius continued his support by promoting her to become the Bauhaus’s first senior female teacher in summer 1923.
But by then, he was locked in a bitter political battle with Itten, who was plotting to replace him as director. Itten was forced to resign and left the school that summer, as did Schreyer. Grunow stayed on but struggled to embrace the new vision of the Bauhaus as a modernist, technocratic institution championed by Gropius as well as Itten’s successor, the Hungarian artist, designer, and theorist László Moholy-Nagy.
She left the Bauhaus in 1924 and spent ten years teaching in Berlin and Hamburg, where she continued her research at the Warburg Institute. Grunow moved to London after the Warburg relocated there to escape Nazism, but was forced to return to Germany when World War II began. She died in 1944, a year before it ended. Grunow has since been largely forgotten not only due to her gender and the timing of her death during wartime, but also because, unlike textile designers such as Albers and Stölzl, or an industrial designer like Brandt, her practice did not leave a physical legacy.
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
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