Directed to Weaving
Gertrud Arndt arrived at the Bauhaus in winter 1923/24 on a scholarship from Erfurt, having spent three years as an architecture apprentice. She wanted to study architecture. There was no formal architecture course available to women at the school, and after the preliminary course under László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche directed her toward the weaving workshop. She later said she had never wanted to weave.
She was good at it regardless. In 1925 she produced Carpet 2, a blue-and-yellow checked geometric design that Walter Gropius had placed in his office. In Dessau she made Carpet Thost, another well-received piece. She passed her journeywoman’s examination in weaving on 4 March 1927. She never returned to a loom afterward.
The Masked Portraits
After graduating and marrying fellow student Alfred Arndt — who later became a Bauhaus master — Gertrud moved to Dessau, lived in one of the Masters’ Houses, and became a guest student in Walter Peterhans’s photography workshop around 1929. Between roughly 1929 and 1932, centred on 1930, she made 43 gelatin silver self-portraits she called Maskenporträts — Masked Portraits. She used household fabrics, veils, hats, and lace to construct improvised costumes and photographed herself in a range of roles: glamorous figures drawn from popular culture, historical and artistic archetypes, widows, flappers, playful disguises. She made the series partly because she had stopped weaving and had time. She did not exhibit it.
The images examine what feminine roles are made of. By staging herself in multiple guises within a single series, Arndt showed that any given presentation of femininity was a construction — assembled from available materials, as deliberate and provisional as a costume assembled from a scrap pile of fabric. The school’s own culture of costume, performance, and material experimentation provided the context. She turned it inward and made it private.
The Maskenporträts were largely unknown until rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s through feminist art history. They are now held in major museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and are her most discussed work. That she made them while living in the Masters’ Houses, on the margins of the institution that had directed her away from what she wanted to do, is part of what makes them what they are.