The Bauhaus school in Germany has long been understood through the writings of its founding director, Walter Gropius, and well-known artists who taught there such as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts by women in the school’s weaving workshop. In Bauhaus Weaving Theory, T’ai Smith uncovers new significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers. From colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of soundproofing and light-reflective fabric, the workshop’s innovative creations influenced a modernist theory of weaving. In the first careful examination of the writings of Bauhaus weavers, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stözl, and Otti Berger, Smith details how these women challenged assumptions about the feminine nature of their craft. As they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines like painting, architecture, and photography, Smith argues, the weavers resisted modernist thinking about distinct media. In parsing texts about tapestries and functional textiles, the vital role these women played in debates about medium in the twentieth century and a nuanced history of the Bauhaus comes to light. Bauhaus Weaving Theory deftly reframes the Bauhaus weaving workshop as central to theoretical inquiry at the school. Putting questions of how value and legitimacy are established in the art world into dialogue with the limits of modernism, Smith confronts the belief that the crafts are manual and technical but never intellectual arts.

When talented female students arrived to study at the Bauhaus, they soon discovered that the founder of the school, Walter Gropius, was not strictly adhering to his original declaration of equality between men and women. In the hierarchy of art and design, it was textiles that were deemed to be 'women's work'. Nevertheless, the new weavers responded to the challenge with remarkable virtuosity, pouring all their artistic energy and talent into this new field of interest. Eagerly embracing advanced technology, they incorporated new or unusual materials (such as Cellophane, leather and early synthetics), creating reversible fabrics which had acoustic and light-reflecting properties. They produced multi-layered cloths, some with double and triple weaves, and later mode extensive use of the jacquard loom. The result was a rebirth of hand-weaving and a new professionalism in designing textiles for mass production. In this model study, superbly illustrated with rare or little seen photographs of the works themselves, Sigrid Wortmann Weltge recreates the atmosphere of creative excitement at the Bauhaus. Original archival research and interviews with survivors and their students, as well as with leading contemporary designers, detail the workshop's history and its enduring legacy : marvellous fabrics still being produced today. Bauhaus Textiles unearths the missing chapter in the story of the most important institution in the history of modern design.

to many surprising discoveries and provides a vivid portrait of Gunta Stolzl as both an individual and an artist." --Book Jacket.