In der ersten Bonusfolge zum eigentlichen Podcast über Ludwig Mies van der Rohe spricht Wita Noack, seit über 30 Jahren Leiterin des Mies van der Rohe Hauses in Berlin mit Sitz im ehemaligen Haus Lemke. Diese Folge enthält Zusatzmaterial, das im englischen Podcast nicht enthalten.

@bauhausfacespodcast | https://www.bauhausfaces.com

In der zweiten Bonusfolge zum eigentlichen Podcast über Ludwig Mies van der Rohe spricht Fritz Neumeyer, promovierter Architekt und Mies-Forscher. Diese Folge enthält Zusatzmaterial, das im englischen Podcast nicht enthalten ist.

@bauhausfacespodcast | https://www.bauhausfaces.com

This episode is dedicated to a Japanese couple who went all the way to Germany to study at the Bauhaus in Dessau: Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki. When they met each other in 1928 Iwao Fujita had already studied architecture in Tokyo and was also actively involved in the theatre. Michiko came from a very wealthy family and was a culturally educated young woman of 18 years. By marrying into the Yamawaki family Iwao profited from their wealth. He happily took on Michiko’s family name in exchange for a World trip with that one final destination: the Bauhaus in Dessau.

In July of 1930 the Yamawakis left Japan, stayed for some time in New York and then went on to Berlin and Dessau. After the preliminary course Michiko decided – due to her interest in fashion – to go into the weaving workshop. Iwao, though an already formed architect, chose to continue in the photo class. He developed a special interest in photo montages. One of them entitled „The attack on the Bauhaus“ became the visual epitome of the forced closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis and is today often used as an illustration of that dark last period of the Bauhaus. These two years at the Bauhaus shaped the future of the Yamawakis sustainably. Upon returning to Japan in 1932, they became pivotal figures in introducing Bauhaus principles to their home country. They brought back a vast collection of Bauhaus objects, books, and furniture, creating a Bauhaus-inspired ambiance in their Tokyo home. And they both taught at art schools using the Bauhaus principles of Josef Albers’ Vorkurs.

On this episode not one but two great researchers help me tell the story of Michiko and Iwao Yamawaki: Helena Capkova and Mariko Takagi.

SHOW NOTES

Mavo movement and Tomoyoshi Murayama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavo

Archives / Collections with Iwao Yamawaki’s photos

Articles about Iwao & Michiko Yamawaki at the Bauhaus

Photos by Iwao Yamawaki

"The Attack on the Bauhaus"

This brand-new episode of "bauhaus faces" is about a rather unknown Bauhausler: Fritz Kuhr. Although he was at the Bauhaus for roughly 7 years he is widely unknown. Kuhr was the student spokesperson of the Bauhaus Master Council, part of the infamous Bauhaus band, helped edit and produce the Bauhaus publications with Ernst Kállai and had a connection to the communists at the Bauhaus. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1930 Kuhr moved to Berlin and tried to make a living as a freelance artist. He was internationally represented by the gallery Ferdinand Möller and though he seemingly was a rising star in the vibrant art scene of the 1930s, this all came to an abrupt end when the Nazis defamed him as a degenerated artist in 1937.

Kuhr stayed in Berlin during World War 2. His atelier was bombed twice and many of his works were partly or completely destroyed. After the second bombing in 1944 Kuhr was drafted into military service and became a Soviet prisoner of war. On his return to Berlin, he was a „bird-free painter in berlin. no studio. no light. no paper. hardly any canvases and oil colours. nevertheless. a new beginning. made possible by the comradeship of colleagues who are also suffering. “

In 1948 Kuhr was appointed as university teacher at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Berlin (today UdK Berlin). From now on, he fully concentrated on his art students. Fritz Kuhr died in 1975.

For this episode fellow art-historian Ute Famulla tells Kuhr’s story. Her family has clos ties with Kuhr and today owns his estate.

SHOW NOTES

https://www.bauhausfaces.com | @bauhausfacespodcast

COLLECTIONS WITH FRITZ KUHR's ART

Website of the Fritz Kuhr Estate https://fritz-kuhr-bauhausler.de

Bauhaus Dessau Foundation https://dam.bauhaus-dessau.de/portals/bilddatenbank/#search/basic/fritz%20kuhr

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin https://open-archive.bauhaus.de

Städelmuseum https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/de/person/kuhr-fritz

Harvard Art Museums https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections

PUBLICATIONS ABOUT FRITZ KUHR

Fritz Kuhr: Bauhaus-Erinnerungen: Meine Meister, Team Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main 1993

Hermann Famulla: Laternenlicht-Komposition. Fotos von Fritz Kuhr, Team Kommunikation Verlag, Berlin 2015

Fritz Kuhr (illustrator) Hermann & Ute Famulla (eds.): _"also wird gemalt" der bauhäusler fritz kuhr, Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop, Ahrenshoop 2019

COVER PHOTO Fritz Kuhr, Self-portrait III, 1926, Courtesy Fritz Kuhr Estate

🎙️ In the latest episode of “bauhaus faces,” we dive into the remarkable story of another iconic Bauhaus couple: Anni and Josef Albers. Their lives and legacies are deeply intertwined— from their first meeting in 1922 in Weimar to their lasting impact on art, design, and education in the US.

Anni, who would later shortly lead the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus and then at Black Mountain College, and Josef, a visionary "young master" of the preliminary course, fled Nazi persecution in 1933. In the U.S., they helped shape the Black Mountain College and continued to innovate—Anni in textiles and jewelry, Josef in teaching and painting. Inspired by their travels to Mexico and their love for geometric forms, their art resonates to this day.

Join me and Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, as we explore the incredible journey of this Bauhaus power couple.

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SHOW NOTES

bauhausfaces.com⁠ | @bauhausfacespodcast (Instagram) | @bauhausfaces (YouTube)

The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation | @albersfoundation (Instagram)

PHOTOS BY JOSEF ALBERS https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights/andreas-grote-frühjahr-30-mama-andreas-grote-spring-30-mother | https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights/tenayuca-mexico_1976-7-632 | https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights/aspen-summer-51

ANJA GUTTENBERGER: „Festive and Theatrical. The Mask Photos of Gertrud Arndt and Josef Albers as an Expression of Festival Culture“, https://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/4273/festive-and-theatrical

HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE SERIES https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights/study-for-homage-to-the-square-lone-light

JOAQUÍN BARRIENDOS: „Josef Albers and the Pre-Columbian Artisan“, https://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/6263/josef-albers-and-the-pre-columbian-artisan

JEAN CHARLOT: „Nature and the Art of Josef Albers,” College Art Journal 15, no. 3, Spring 1956, https://vault.jeancharlot.org/english-texts/1956%20Nat%20Art%20Albers.pdf

MEANDER WEAVINGS https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights/red-meander | https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights/black-white-gold-i

JEWELRY BY ANNI ALBERS https://www.albersfoundation.org/tags/jewelry

BRENDA DANILOWITZ, "Working From Where We Are – Anni Albers’ and Alex Reed’s Jewelry Collection", https://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/3094/working-from-where-we-are

DIY: Washer and ribbon neon necklace tutorial http://maikonagao.blogspot.com/2013/04/diy-washer-and-ribbon-neon-necklace.html

STEN NADOLNY, "ULLSTEINROMAN" (2003): ⁠https://www.ullstein.de/werke/ullsteinroman/taschenbuch/9783548269863⁠

COVER PHOTO: Josef and Anni Albers in Dessau, Germany, ca. 1925, Photographer unknown, Courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

This episode of "bauhaus faces“ is not about a typical Bauhäusler, not a student or a master. She nevertheless played crucial part in documenting the history of the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1928 in her diary. Of course she was also Walter Gropius’s closest confidant, advisor, and editor, his wife, Ise Gropius.

Ilse Frank was raised in Hannover and worked as a Red Cross Nurse during World War I. She moved to Munich in 1922 to work at a publishing house. When her mother was dying Ilse returned to Hannover in 1923. Here she met Walter Gropius at one of his lectures about the Bauhaus. They started to write letters to each other and quickly became affectionate. She wrote to him „Up to now my whole life I felt as if I have been pushing a very heavy boat over a gravel path. And the minute I met you, my big boat suddenly glided into water.“ She had been waiting to meet a person like him, although at first she was more interested in his Bauhaus idea than in the man himself; that came with getting to know him better. So, she broke off the engagement to her cousin, moved to Weimar and only a few months after knowing Walter Gropius, they got married. From the very start, their relationship was a symbiotic one, also shown in their nicknames. While she Walter Gropius was known at the Bauhaus as “Pius”, Ise was often called “Pia”.

Ise Gropius entered the service of the Bauhaus as a secretary, editor, organizer and ‘equal partner’ for Gropius. Soon, she became “Mrs. Bauhaus” and liked her role very much. „The Bauhaus infected me,“ she would later say.

For this episode the architect and author Jana Revedin helps to tell the story of Ise Gropius. She wrote a biographical novel called "Jeder hier nennt mich Frau Bauhaus“. The novel is based on Ise Gropius as a main character and her diary that she kept during her stay at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928.

www.bauhausfaces.com | @bauhausfaces

FILM „Wie wohnen wir gesund und wirtschaftlich: Neues Wohnen“ https://vimeo.com/292714014?from=outro-embed

TOUR OF THE GROPIUS HOUSE https://gropius.house/location/video-tour-by-ise-gropius/

THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF „MRS BAUHAUS“ by Katy Kelleher, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-story-mrs-bauhaus

This episode of bauhaus faces is about the Bauhaus educated architect Pius Pahl. After being trained as carpenter and interior designer, he decided it was time to go to the Bauhaus and become an architect. He studied with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, who would both become essential for his approach towards designing buildings. Pius Pahl is also one of the students who made the Bauhaus move from Dessau to Berlin. After successfully graduating with his Bauhaus diploma in 1933 he went on a journey to Switzerland, Italy and North Africa before starting to work in different architecture offices. In World War II he was drafted by the military and became a prisoner of war. Although he set up his own building office in 1946 in fear for his four sons to also become soldiers in a war – it was the time of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West – Pius Pahl decided it was time to emigrate. While he wasn’t allowed to go to the US to work with Mies van der Rohe in Chicago (this was his dream) the choice fell on South Africa, because his wife Jeanette was born there and could speak English fluently. Pius, however, struggled during the first years as his language skills were underwhelming. Once he and his family had relocated to Stellenbosch and he had started – once again – his own office Pius Pahl planned several public and private houses, adapted to the possibilities and materials there. Two of his four sons, Jan-Peter and Tyll Pahl invited me into their houses to talk to me about their father and his work.   

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SHOW NOTES

@bauhausfaces | bauhausfaces.com | YouTube

https://www.vervemagazine.co.nz/african-bauhaus/

http://oharchitecture.blogspot.com/2011/07/oh6-pius-pahl-monograph.html

https://www.stellenboschheritage.co.za/resource/pius-pahl-architectural-biography-part-1-pg-1-12

https://artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/archframes.php?archid=2113

https://artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/bldgframes_mob.php?bldgid=15093

COVER PHOTO: Pius Pahl, Detail of a self-portrait, Bauhaus Berlin, 1933, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

This episode of bauhaus faces is about a photographer that most Bauhaus fans today know: Lucia Moholy. She was the photographer who delivered the photos of the Bauhaus in Dessau and its masters’ houses that made the art school so iconic. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that art historians became alert to her when her photos and negatives made their way into the Bauhaus-Archive in Berlin. Until then they had taken a long reroute from Germany via the US, while Lucia Moholy had thought they were lost, when in fact Bauhaus founder and first director Walter Gropius had taken them with him, denied their possession for decades and made use of them to promote the Bauhaus as the ultimate epitome of the avantgarde without ever mentioning their creator: Lucia Moholy.

But her life and work were so much more! When she was in danger of being arrested by the Nazis, Lucia left Germany and emigrated to London. Here, she worked as a portrait photographer and – as director – set up the microfilm archive ASLIB. She never succeeded in emigrating to the US like so many other Bauhauslers although she had an offer from her ex-husband László Moholy-Nagy to come and teach photography at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Most of her adult life, Lucia Moholy struggled to make ends meet and gain recognition for her achievements. When she – once more – emigrated to Switzerland in 1959 (she would live and die in Zollikon near Zurich) Lucia started writing about her collaborative work with László Moholy-Nagy and her own share in it.

SHOW NOTES

⁠www.bauhausfaces.com⁠ | ⁠@bauhausfaces⁠

EXHIBITION „Lucia Moholy: Exposures“ at Kunsthalle Praha from 30th May until 28th October 2024 https://www.kunsthallepraha.org/en/events/lucia-moholy-exposures AND at Fotostiftung Winterthur in Spring 2025 https://fotostiftung.ch/en/

BOOKS BY LUCIA MOHOLY 

„A Hundred Years of Photography“ (Lucia Moholy, 1939) https://www.amazon.de/Photography-1839-1939-Fotografie-Bauhäusler-Bauhaus-Archiv/dp/3922613586

„Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy/Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes“ (Lucia Moholy, 1972)

ABOUT LUCIA MOHOLY

Lucia Moholy Bauhaus Fotografin (Rolf Sachsse, 1995) 

„‚What I Could Lose‘: The Fate of Lucia“ (Meghan Forbes) Moholyhttps://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0055.102;view=text;rgn=main;xc=1;g=mqrg

Lucia Moholy. Im Schatten des Bauhaus (Jochen Stöckmann, 2022) https://www.weltkunst.de/ausstellungen/2022/09/lucia-moholy-fotografie-bauhaus?pagination=1&fullview

ABOUT LUCIA MOHOLY’S BOOKS AND NEGATIVES

„Multiple Frames for Lucia Moholy“ (Sabine Hartmann) https://youtu.be/aB5ioylqVuM?si=1ggYQUgMXe6FWHic

„Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy“ (Robin Schuldenfrei) https://courtauld.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Schuldenfrei2013ImagesinExileLuciaMoholys_Bauhaus.pdf

„A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939“ (Burcu Dogramaci) https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/1470/object/5140-11251867

PHOTOS BY LUCIA MOHOLY IN ARCHIVESBauhaus photos 

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin https://open-archive.bauhaus.de/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=direct/1/ResultDetailView/result.inline.moduleBottomContextFunctionBar1.bottomNavigator.back&sp=13&sp=Sartist&sp=SfilterDefinition&sp=0&sp=1&sp=1&sp=SdetailView&sp=93&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=T&sp=0&sp=SdetailList&sp=6&sp=0

Harvard Art Museums https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections

National Portrait Gallery https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp07323/lucia-moholy

Fotostiftung Winterthur, Switzerland https://fotostiftung.ch.zetcom.net/de/artists/artist/1395/

MoMA, New York https://www.moma.org/artists/6922

COVER PHOTO: László Moholy-Nagy: Portrait of Lucia Moholy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain, CC0 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60426673

This episode is not about just one Bauhaus person, but about two. It’s the premiere of our first episode about a Bauhaus couple: Etel and Ernst Mittag, who were both students at the Bauhaus in Dessau, met there, fell in love, got married, had children and emigrated to South Africa when Etel – as a Jew – was in great danger in Europe.  

About her time at the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1930 Etel later wrote in her autobiography: “This was a new world for me. Everything was completely different from what I knew. Nothing was taken for granted. Everything had to be discussed, examined anew from different angles. […] There was almost absolute freedom from prejudice. Of course, I was completely bewildered and intimidated.”

Etel studied at the advertising department and then, when founded in 1929, at the photo class. She became prolific in it and could earn a living with it for some time. At a demonstration on the International Women’s Day Etel met two rough looking fellows who had arrived at the Bauhaus via the river Elbe by boat. One of them was Ernst Mittag. He was from Riesa and had studied in Dresden before coming to the Bauhaus to study architecture and carpentry. The two of them became involved in the communist movement, holding clandestine political meetings in their kitchen in a workers’ housing estate in Ziebigk, a suburb of Dessau, and publishing a communist paper in Berlin after leaving the Bauhaus. Even in South Africa they felt most comfortable with the members of a Left book club.

While Etel Fodor-Mittag wrote her autobiography “Not an unusual Life, for the Time and the Place” (published by the Bauhaus-Archive Berlin in 2014), not much is known about Ernst Mittag. Until now. In this podcast their younger son Michael Mittag tries to remember as much as possible about both of his parents by remembering conversations with them, by looking at old papers of them and by talking about their work and projects.

_________________

SHOW NOTES

www.bauhausfaces.com | @bauhausfaces

BIOGRAPHY ABOUT ETEL FODOR-MITTAG bauhauskooperation.com/wissen/das-bauhaus/koepfe Etel's autobiography Etel Fodor-Mittag: Not an unusual Life, for the Time and the Place / Ein Leben, nicht einmal ungewöhnlich für diese Zeit und diesen Ort, Bauhäusler. Dokumente aus dem Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Bd. 3, Berlin 2014.

Photos by Etel Fodor-Mittag Photo study with toy pistol and sugar cubes, ca. 1928 & Advertising image for Idanthren-Farben, ca. 1929 ⁠bauhauskooperation.com/wissen/das-bauhaus/koepfe Portrait of Ricarda Schwerin, ca. 1931  kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Persons/schwerin-ricarda-en.html Portrait of Isaak Butkow, 1929 bauhauskooperation.com/wissen/das-bauhaus/koepfe

RBB facts about Berlin after WWII rbb24.de/politik/thema/2015/70-jahre-kriegsende/beitraege/kriegsschaeden-berlin-2--weltkrieg.html/listall=on/print=true.html

History of the Appletiser Farm in Elgin, ZA elginvalleyhistory.blogspot.com

Cover photo Etel and Ernst Mittag, Bauhaus Dessau, 1929, unknown photographer. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin