Ise Gropius

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ise Gropius (née Ilse Frank) (born March 1, 1897 in Wiesbaden ; † June 9, 1983 in Lexington , Massachusetts ) was a German lecturer and writer .

Life

The daughter of the Prussian government councilor Georg Frank and his wife Paula geb. Heckmann lived in Hanover until 1921 , then for two years in Munich , where she worked in the book trade. After her return to Hanover in 1923, during one of his lectures, she met the then director of the State Bauhaus in Weimar , her future husband, Walter Gropius . Ise Gropius left her then fiancé, a cousin, on the spur of the moment and arrived in Weimar shortly before the start of the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 . Ise and Walter Gropius married in Weimar on October 16 of the same year; Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were her best men. Together they adopted Beate Forberg , called Ati, after the death of her mother, one of Ise's two sisters. The actress Ellen Frank was a younger sister of Ise.

Ise Gropius renounced an independent profession and entered the service of the Bauhaus: as secretary, editor, organizer and for Gropius as a “partner of equal rank”. In an interview published posthumously in 1986 she stated: “The Bauhaus idea became my second self. Once infected, it affected every aspect of life. "

In addition to organizational tasks, Ise Gropius also partly contributed to the design. With her husband's architectural corrections, she designed the Dessau Masters' House and items for the kitchen shortly before Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the revolutionary Frankfurt kitchen in 1926 .

By the summer of 1930 at the latest, there had been an extramarital relationship with Herbert Bayer , which lasted until Ise Gropius emigrated to London. The couple had known each other from joint activities at the Bauhaus since 1925 .

A large number of private and public photographs of the couple have been preserved in the estate of Walter and Ise Gropius in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin and in the archive of the Houghton Library , Harvard College Library. Today it is not possible to clearly identify the authorship of most photos, as some are unlabeled and some are only titled. Only the self-portraits of Ise Gropius, which show her mirror image or her photographed silhouette, are clearly of her.

Ise Gropius' actual job at the Bauhaus and later in Berlin, Great Britain and the USA was the preparation of letters and the editing of scientific essays, lectures and articles by Walter Gropius. On the basis of jointly written texts, she adapted the texts to the respective orders.

In Berlin, Ise Gropius began to publish under his own name. Inspired by travel and her own interests, she wrote a large number of articles that she sold to publishers. These included a trip around the world on the gramophone ( Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ) , end of 1934), the English at home ( Beyers for all , 1933/1934), the utility apartment (K. Thiemanns Verlag, October 1929), housewives, dachshunds and other world citizens ( DAZ of April 17, 1934) or What does the New Yorker look like? ( The Lady , November 1928).

After emigrating to London (1934 to 1937) and finally to the USA, their brief success came to an end quickly. After she offered the article Grandma was a Career Girl to the Atlantic Monthly , she got a rejection. This was done on the grounds that they did not want to support or even encourage the “terrible idea” of working women, which Ise Gropius discussed in her contribution and who, as the author, also represented this ideal herself. She decided to leave it at that and from now on concentrated on editing Walter Gropius' texts. Gropius dedicated his books to her as a “consolation”.

It was only in the Bauhaus 1919–1928 catalog from 1938, which appeared alongside the Bauhaus exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art , that Ise Gropius was named as author and editor together with Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer, thus achieving public recognition of their work.

Fonts

  • Ise Gropius: Bauhaus diary 1923–1928. Unpublished typescript, Gropius estate, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
  • Ise Gropius: Small But Perfect Things: A Remembrance by Ise Gropius. Boston 1986.

literature

  • Reginald Isaacs: Walter Gropius: Man and his work. Vol. 2, Berlin: Mann 1984, ISBN 3-7861-1398-X .
  • Annemarie Jaeggi, Gerda Breuer (eds.): Walter Gropius: Amerikareise 1928 / Walter Gropius: American Journey 1928. Wuppertal 2008, ISBN 978-3-9811669-9-6 .
  • Ati Gropius Johansen: Walter Gropius: The Man Behind the Ideas. New England Society. 2012.
  • Ulrike Müller: Bauhaus women: masters in art, craft and design . Munich: Sandmann, 2009, pp. 136–141, ISBN 9783938045367 .
  • Jana Revedin : Everyone here calls me Ms. Bauhaus. The life of Ise Frank. A biographical novel . Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag 2018, ISBN 9783832183547 .
  • Ise Gropius . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 68-71.

Audio documents

  • Ati Gropius Johansen: Interview with Ise Gropius. 1980, tape recording, Bauhaus Archive Berlin.
  • Hans-Maria Wingler: Interview with Ise Gropius. Tape recording, undated, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/DE/Personen/gropius-walter.html
  2. ↑ Reginald Isaacs, Walter Gropius: Man and his work. Volume 2, Berlin 1984.
  3. ^ Ise Gropius: Small But Perfect Things. A remembrance by Ise Gropius. Boston 1986.
  4. ^ Ise Gropius: Bauhaus diary 1923–1928. Unpublished typescript, Gropius estate, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
personal data
SURNAME Gropius, Ise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frank, Ilse (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German editor and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1983
Place of death Lexington