Bauhaus Rug with Cubist Pattern
The Bauhaus was a very influential school of art and design, active in Germany between 1919 and 1933. It attracted many of the leading intellectuals and artists of the period, who were interested in taking to the next level the theory and praxis of the modern avant-garde movements. Johannes Itten was a painter whose interests in colour theory sparked the imagination of one of his students, Gunta Stölzl, who soon applied his teachings to the textile medium. In 1924 they founded together near Zurich the Ontos Weaving Workshops, which allowed them to produce many of the projects they had been working on at the Bauhaus.
This example is woven in what the Bauhaus defined as the ‘Smyrna’ technique, meaning that it had the same structural features of a Turkish rug (symmetrically knotted wool pile on a wool foundation). The back shows the characteristic grid of Bauhaus ‘Smyrna’ rugs, which they employed in order to weave the pattern with more precision. Both Itten and Stölzl favoured Cubist-inspired patterns, as seen on a rug designed by Itten for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris (see Gunta Stölzl & Johannes Itten, Textile Universes, Thun: Hirmer, 2024, fig. 14, p. 75) as well as on a Smyrna rug designed by Stölzl during her Bauhaus residency in 1922-23 (ibid, fig. 1, p. 109).
The central pinwheel-like element is a motif that was studied by Itten since his early Bauhaus years (see Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten, Berlin 1994, Kat. 159, p. 74).