Michiko Yamawaki

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Michiko Yamawaki's student ID from 1930

Michiko Yamawaki ( Japanese 山 脇 道 子 Yamawaki Michiko , born July 13, 1910 in Tsukiji , Chūō district , died 2000 in Tokyo) was one of four Japanese students at the Bauhaus in Dessau and later in Berlin in the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe era . There she studied drawing, weaving and typography. Together with her husband, the photographer and architect Iwao Yamawaki (1898–1987), she worked at the Bauhaus from 1930 until shortly before it was closed in 1932. After her Bauhaus days, she was a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Design and Architecture and was instrumental in spreading the Bauhaus concept and its ideas in Japan.

Live and act

Michiko Yamawaki was born in the 43rd year of the reign of Emperor Meiji and first attended a women's school. She was the oldest daughter of the Yamawaki family. Before her wedding, she had little experience in design and architecture. That changed when she came to the Bauhaus. Yamawaki was the daughter of a wealthy master of the Japanese tea ceremony and, like all Japanese girls of that class, was first and foremost a good wife. At the age of 18 she finished school at the girls' high school and began preparing for her life as a bride. She learned to play the piano, housekeeping and cooking. Her marriage in 1928 to Iwao Fujita, 12 years her senior, who took his wife's name because Michiko was intended as the future head of her family, was arranged and planned. The marriage was to begin with a trip around the world, which initially led from Japan to the USA in Hawaii. They finally came to New York via California. They stayed in New York for two months. Michiko had her long hair cut there against her mother's wishes and the bob that was modern in the 1920s . From then on she wore fashionable western clothing. The passport photo on her student ID shows her as a modern woman.

After a total of 40 days of sea voyage, they arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1930, and planned to continue on to the Bauhaus in Dessau. Iwao was already familiar with the Bauhaus and its theories from books, for example the Bauhaus book by László Moholy-Nagy with the title “From material to architecture” from 1929, which was in demand in Japan at that time but was rarely available. While Iwao's application was accepted immediately; unlike Michiko, he had already completed a university degree in architecture and had professional experience, she was nevertheless approved on a trial basis for a preliminary drawing course with Josef Albers , who noticed her progress and praised her. Then she took the subject “Analytical Drawing” with Wassily Kandinsky , typography with Joost Schmidt and Gestalt psychology with Karlfried Graf Dürckheim , who was a lecturer at the Bauhaus in 1930/31. In 1931 she received unrestricted admission by Mies van der Rohe to the weaving class of Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers , but with the advice to urgently improve her language skills so that she could better follow further studies. She spoke little German, but English better. Kandinsky and other Bauhaus masters often devoted time to her and her husband after regular lessons to rework what they had learned, sometimes in English.

In 1932, shortly before the Bauhaus was forced to close for political reasons, the Yamawakis decided to leave Germany and Europe. Via Great Britain and the Netherlands, where they met the De Stijl architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud , they traveled to Naples and from there back to Japan. When they returned home in 1932, the couple had many of their works and Bauhaus books with them, which were later to be translated into Japanese. These included Michiko's two looms, metalwork by Marianne Brandt , but also furniture by Marcel Breuer and many fabric samples by Otti Berger . They moved into a large apartment in Tokyo, one floor of which was dedicated to the Bauhaus. Michiko started a career as a model and textile designer. In 1934 she was appointed lecturer at the Tokyo School of Design and Architecture. But she soon gave up the job because she was expecting a child. In view of the awakening nationalism and militarism in Japan, the university was not given a long life either; it had to close under pressure from the Ministry of Education. After the Second World War, Michiko taught at Nihon University in Tokyo . In an interview in 1993 Michiko said in relation to the material in terms of the Bauhaus: “Never copy anything. You have to know yourself. but the most important thing is the knowledge of the material. "

In her childhood and youth, Michiko Yamawaki had no access to western design and western modern architecture and art, she only knew the traditional art forms of Japan. However, since her first contact with the Bauhaus idea, she saw similarities that had a lasting impact on her work, drawings and designs for fabric samples. Looking back in 1995 in her memoirs she wrote: “The functionality of the tools for a tea ceremony hardly differs from the Bauhaus functionality, which frees itself from all useless objects. Some elements, [...] after everything superfluous has been removed, harmonize with each other and show a presence that seems to have been there from the start. ”The drawings that Kandinsky made were abstract compositions that conveyed his ideas on form an internal tension of line, point and surface. Her designs for design fabrics from the Bauhaus weaving mill were novel because, inspired for example by Lilly Reich, they contained foreign material such as the plastics that had just been created and their geometric-abstract shapes corresponded exactly to the Bauhaus style, but in muted colors. Her carpet from 1932, on the other hand, is splendidly colorful. Her work A Safety Zone , shown as a thesis in Dessau at the end of 1931, is a diagonally composed collage of photos with integrated wire netting on a black background, which occupies a special position and, according to the authors of the book, women at the Bauhaus is an “uncanny mixture of the archaic and the modern, danger and security”.

Fonts (selection)

  • Michiko Yamawaki, Naomichi Kawahata: Bauhausu to chanoyu - バ ウ ハ ウ ス と 茶 の 湯 . Shinchosha, Tokyo 1995, ISBN 4-10-404201-3 (Japanese, The Bauhaus and the Tea Ceremony).

literature

  • Helena Čapková: Transnational Networkers - Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki and the Formation of Japanese Modernist Design . In: Journal of Design History . tape 27 , no. 4 , 2014, ISSN  0952-4649 , p. 370-385 , doi : 10.1093 / jdh / epu009 .
  • Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto, Birgit van der Avoort: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . 1st edition. Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 166-171 .
  • Edit Tóth: “Taking Apart” the Sukiya - The Yamawakis' Postwar Tokyo Homes . In: Design and Visual Culture from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Art: Optical Deconstructions . Routledge, New York, NY 2018, ISBN 978-1-351-06244-2 ( books.google.de - reading sample).
  • Michiko Yamawaki . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 166-171.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tokyo Culture Addiction: 花嫁修行中の日本人女性がバウハウスに入学したら~ 「バウハウスと茶の湯」を読んで~ Hanayome Shugyo-chū no nipponjinjosei ga Bauhausu ni nyūgaku Shitara ~ "Bauhausu to chanoyu" o yonde ~ ( c- addiction.typepad.jp )
  2. ↑ Lutz Schöbe: Bauhaus photography: from the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation . Fratelli Alinari spa, Florence 2004, ISBN 88-7292-461-8 , p. 194 ( books.google.de ).
  3. ↑ Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto, Birgit van der Avoort: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. 1st edition. Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , p. 166 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Yamawaki, Michiko
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 山 脇 道 子 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese student at the Bauhaus and textile and fashion designer
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Tsukiji , Chūō District
DATE OF DEATH 2000
Place of death Tokyo