Monica Bella Ullmann-Broner

Monica Bella Ullmann-Broner , née Bella Ullmann, (born March 2, 1905 in Nuremberg , † December 7, 1993 in Stuttgart ) was a German textile designer .

Life

Monica Bella Ullmann-Broner comes from a Jewish hop merchant family . The parents took care of their extensive training and in 1926 sent them to the Loheland school near Fulda . Presumably she completed an apprenticeship as a factory teacher in Hildesheim from 1927 to 1929 . In 1929 she enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau . She took the preliminary course in color theory with Josef Albers and analytical drawing with Wassily Kandinsky . Ullmann-Broner also attended courses with Hinnerk Scheper on wall painting, with Joost Schmidt on illustration, and with Walter Peterhans on photography. On a poster designed by Bauhaus classmate and KPD member Max Gebhardt in 1930 , she poses with an outstretched arm and a hand clenched into a fist. The image montage contains the inscription “Working women. Fight with us! Vote communists. List 4 ”. Ullmann-Broner received her training in the weaving workshop under Gunta Stölzl , where she was involved in drafts for industry.

In 1933 she married the civil engineer Karl Ernst Rosenthal in Munich. The marriage ended in divorce in 1938. During the time of National Socialism , as a half-Jewish woman , she was in danger and went to Palestine . There she worked with the former Bauhaus student and architect Arieh Sharon in urban development from 1936 to 1938 . In Palestine she married the painter and architect Erwin Heilbronner , who came from the Jewish Broner banking family from Munich. The couple went to America and settled in Los Angeles in 1938 , where she worked as an outfitter for films. When they obtained American citizenship, they changed the family name to Broner. In 1948 the couple moved to Krumville , New York State , where the von Ullmann-Broner family, who had emigrated to the United States, had owned a farm since 1941. In the same year the couple separated and Ullmann-Broner went to Paris until 1949. There she worked as a film photographer when shooting Alice in Wonderland . She then worked in the American southern states for the textile industry as a textile designer and later in New York as an illustrator of children's books. Works by Ullmann-Broner were shown in the Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition on textiles in 1956 . In 1968 she returned to Germany in connection with the anniversary exhibition 50 Years of Bauhaus and lived in Stuttgart, where she was no longer artistic. Here she campaigned for the preservation of the legacy of the Bauhaus.

literature

• Andrea-Beate Dippel: Monica Bella Ullmann-Broner . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 140-145.