Gertrud Arndt

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Gertrud Arndt (* on September 20, 1903 as Gertrud Hantschk in Ratibor ; † July 10, 2000 in Darmstadt ) was a German Bauhaus student and photographer.

Life

Gertrud Hantschk's father was a foreman in the leather industry, she was the youngest of four children. Her family had lived in Erfurt since 1916 , where she did an apprenticeship in Karl Meinhardt's architecture office from 1919 and began taking photos for the company. She attended the arts and crafts school in Erfurt with the aim of becoming an architect. In the winter semester of 1923 she was accepted for the preliminary course at the Bauhaus Weimar , in which she had lessons with Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy . She could not realize her wish to become an architect at the Bauhaus, instead she got a training position in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus . After three years she passed the journeyman's examination at the weaving guild in Glauchau . A knotted carpet based on their design was ordered from the Hamburg shipowner Eberhard Thost from the Bauhaus; a carpet that was temporarily in Walter Gropius ' director's room in Weimar could later be rewoven based on the templates. After completing her apprenticeship, she stopped doing textile work.

In addition, she self-taught improved her photographic techniques. In 1927 she married the Bauhaus graduate Alfred Arndt and moved with him to Probstzella , where he was involved as an architect in the construction of the House of the People . They had two children, Gertrud Arndt took care of the family, her own dream of a career had not come true. When Alfred Arndt was appointed to the Bauhaus by the Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer in 1929 , the Arndts returned to the Dessau Bauhaus and moved to one of the masters' houses on Burgkühnauer Allee. Alfred Arndt became head of the finishing workshop, in which the metal workshop, carpentry and wall painting were combined.

There Gertrud Arndt also used the bathroom as a darkroom . The couple were friends with Gunta Stölzl . During this time, Walter Peterhans built up the systematic teaching of photography at the Bauhaus, Arndt did not take part because she already mastered the technical aspects taught there. After the politically motivated closure of the Bauhaus in 1932, Alfred Arndt worked again in Probstzella, while Gertrud Arndt took care of the family. 1948 fled the family from the Soviet Zone of West Germany and settled in Darmstadt on.

From 1926 to 1932 there is an extensive collection of Gertrud Arndt's amateur photos that she developed herself at home. In 1929/30 Arndt had created a series of 43 self-portraits, which she titled “Mask Portraits”. She also portrayed her fellow Bauhaus student Otti Berger . Her photographic work was only discovered by Ute Eskildsen for Bauhaus research in 1979 at an exhibition in the Folkwang Museum .

Exhibition catalogs

  • Bauhaus and seeing new things: photographs by Lucia Moholy, Gertrud Arndt, Elsbeth Juda . Exhibition catalog. Justus-von-Liebig-Verlag Darmstadt, 2013.
  • Christian Wolsdorff: I actually wanted to become an architect. Gertrud Arndt as a weaver and photographer at the Bauhaus 1923-31 . Exhibition catalog. Bauhaus Archive Berlin, 2013.
  • Sabina Leßmann: Gertrud Arndt: Photographs by the Bauhaus artist . Exhibition catalog. The Hidden Museum Berlin, 1994.
  • Gerhard Leistner , Werner Timm : Alfred Arndt, Gertrud Arndt. Two artists from the Bauhaus. Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, June 8th – July 14th, 1991, ISBN 978-3-89188-056-2 .

literature

  • Michael Heyder: Arndt, Gertrud . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 5, Saur, Munich a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-598-22745-0 , p. 189.
  • Ulrike Müller : Bauhaus women: masters in art, craft and design . With the collaboration of Ingrid Radewaldt and Sandra Kemker. Munich: Sandmann, 2009, pp. 56–61
  • Kunstring Folkwang Essen (Ed.): Gertrud Arndt. Mask self-portraits, 1930 . 8 photographs, reprints. Selection and text: Ute Eskildsen . Essen: Kunstring Folkwang Essen. 1996
  • Anja Guttenberger: Photographic self-portraits of the Bauhaus members between 1919 and 1933 . Berlin: Free University of Berlin University Library, 2012
  • Kai Uwe Schierz, Patrick Rössler, Miriam Krautwurst, Elizabeth Otto (eds.): 4 "Bauhaus girls": Arndt, Brandt, Heymann, Reichardt , Dresden, Sandstein 2019, ISBN 978-3-95498-459-6 , 335 pp .
  • Ulrike Müller: Bauhaus women: Masters in art, craft and design. With the collaboration of Ingrid Radewaldt, Linn Burchert, Katharina Hövelmann and Sandra Kemker. 2nd, completely revised edition, Munich, Sandmann 2019, ISBN 978-3-945543-57-3 , pp. 52–57
  • Gertrud Arndt . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 58-61.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anja Guttenberger: Photographic Self-Portraits , 2012, p. 17