A salute to Frau-haus!

The Bauhaus was an art school, but it was also considered a movement. It existed in Germany as a practising school from 1919 to 1933 in three different locations: the city of Weimar, Dessau and then finally, very briefly, in Berlin. Bauhaus is often remembered as a reproducible but somewhat boring form of modernism; however, the movement had a lot of complexities, especially when considered in the context of society at the time. From as far back as 1919, German law forbid sexual relations between men – and while sex between women was not criminalised, it was certainly still considered problematic. Despite this, Berlin was known throughout Europe as a centre of gay life, for both men and women. This is an important backdrop for thinking about queer Bauhaus women. Within the school itself, many forms of queer culture thrived, even if Bauhaus was not a queer-friendly institution. 

Florence Henri was born in New York but grew up among the circles of the avant-garde in Europe. She was a trained concert pianist and went by the Bauhaus briefly to visit her friends, including the painter and later partner Margarete Schall. In 1927, she decided to stay, probably for Lucia Moholy, wife of the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, who taught Henri photography. There was no official photography program at the Bauhaus at the time, but Moholy photographed herself and occasionally taught others how to photograph. 

Henri took classes with the painter Wassily Kandinsky, among others, and the artist Josef Albers, who remained a champion of her work for the rest of their lives. In 1928, Henri took her companion and partner, Schall, with her to Paris, along with many items of Bauhaus furniture that Henri had purchased.  

While living in Paris, Henri took photographs of other members of the Bauhaus, including Ré Richter, also known as Ré Soupault, a Bauhaus weaver herself, as well as a photographer and fashion designer. By the end of the 1920s, Henri’s photographs were suddenly everywhere. Albers saw some of them in an exhibition called Contemporary Photography in 1929, for which, a reviewer wrote: ‘France contributed with many dated imitations, but only one modern photographer, Florence Henri’ In the notes of his catalogue, Albers added: ‘The best’. ¹  

That same year, two young women named Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach met while apprenticing with Berlin-based photographer Walter Peterhans. A year later they were running their own studio, naming it ringl + pit because they thought Auerbach and Stan sounded like a ‘Jew in a Jewish clothing store’. ‘ringl’ was Stan’s childhood nickname. ‘pit’ was the nickname Stan gave Auerbach, and it referred to a dancer who was popular at the time. As artistic collaborators and romantic partners, Stern and Auerbach took on the medium of advertising, which was a new, very competitive field, and while they did some interesting things in it, they didn’t seem to care that much about succeeding, which was good because they were working during the Great Depression and there wasn’t much money to be had. But I think embracing this queer art of failure was something that they did particularly well.  

I think it’s imperative to restore the Bauhaus queer history as best we can, even if it means drawing from the margins. The work of Henri, ringl + pit, and others tells us that queer women were just as much a part of the school’s mainstream and its experimental avant-garde wing, as those handful of heterosexual men we’ve all heard so much about.  

Elizabeth Otto is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Buffalo’s College of Arts and Sciences, New York. Her work specialises in gender and visual culture in early twentieth-century Europe.

This extract appeared in NGV Magazine Issue 35 | Jul – Aug 2022.

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