Gunta Stölzl: the design is inside the cloth

A striped cloth may look like a drawing laid over a material. Gunta Stölzl’s work invites us to reverse the question: what if the drawing emerged from the way that material was built? In Wall Hanging, made in 1924 and held by MoMA, horizontal bands demonstrate different weaving procedures. Composition and technique are not separate chapters. Looking at the surface also means encountering the work that holds it together. The pattern asks to be read as a construction. [2]

Stölzl entered the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. She trained in weaving and helped establish a dyeing workshop; she later worked at the school in Dessau, leading its weaving workshop from 1926 to 1931. The Bauhaus Kooperation biography also records coverings for furniture by Marcel Breuer. These activities place her research between teaching, experimentation and everyday objects. A textile could be considered both through its appearance and through the use for which it was being developed. [1]

The museum record for the 1924 work lists wool, silk, mercerized cotton and metal thread. These are not interchangeable names for one colourful ingredient. MoMA interprets the work as an exploration of method, material and expression. As an observation exercise, we can set aside the represented subject for a moment. Where does the density change? Where does one band interrupt another? How might we distinguish a line constructed through weaving from a line imagined only on a sheet of paper? [2]

In Weaving, dated around 1928, MoMA identifies a vocabulary of checks, stripes and plaids also developed for designs intended for mass production. The same investigation could inform a unique wall hanging. This does not make all textiles equivalent, or justify calling every geometric blanket Bauhaus. The discovery is more specific: repetition can become a design tool, while an apparently simple surface may depend on a series of carefully considered choices about how to make it. [3]

Try an invented example: place two samples on an imaginary table, one showing stripes drawn on paper, the other made from crossing ribbons. Look from a distance, then closer, and ask what the second construction makes you decide. Which ribbon continues? Which passes over another? What happens at the edge? We are not reconstructing a historical lesson by Stölzl. We are using her work to ask questions of our own. A sample can become visible reasoning, without already having to present itself as a finished product. [2][3]