Gertrud Grunow

Gertrud Grunow (8 July 1870 – 11 June 1944) was a German specialist in vocal pedagogy, associated with the Bauhaus design school where she taught courses in reharmonisation until summer 1924.[1]

In late 1919 Grunow approached the Swiss painter and designer Johannes Itten, and proposed that she give lectures at the Bauhaus on harmony.[2] Grunow, supported by Johannes Itten and Georg Muche, also was involved in the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923.

She began teaching at the school from the end of 1919.[1] Employed initially as an assistant teacher, Grunow taught a course of practical 'Harmonisation' at the Bauhaus from the end of 1919 to summer 1924.[1] Grunow was not universally popular among students at the Bauhaus, with one complaining of her methods that "She was convinced that she could place us, the students, by means of music and a self-induced trance state into an inner equilibrium that would strengthen and harmonize our creative powers."[2] Grunow also claimed that she could develop any faculty, even boxing.[2]

Born in Berlin,[1] Grunow formulated theories of the relationships between sound, colour and movement, and held her first lectures on her theories in Berlin in 1919.[1] From 1924 to 1934 she was teaching in Berlin, still in contact with Wassily Kandinsky, and in Hamburg, and internationally, teaching for several months in England and Switzerland in the late 1930s.[1] Grunow returned to Germany in the Second World War, and died in Leverkusen in 1944.[1]

Though Walter Gropius in 1923, as well as Giulio Carlo Argan in his "Walter Gropius e la Bauhaus"[3] have described her real influence as the only female master of the Weimar Bauhaus, though her research in Hamburg in collaboration with Heinz Werner, Ernst Cassirer and Gertrud Bing, and her close contact to Hilla von Rebay, Droste and Forgács and many others have mirrored their misunderstanding, to label Grunow as "extremely sensitive and sensitive to occultism".[2]

Work

Gertrud Grunow: The Creation of Living Form through Color, Form, and Sound (1923), Hans Maria Wingler, Joseph Stein. The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. MIT Press, 1969, 69 - 33. ISBN 0-262-23033-X

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Magdalena Droste (2002). Bauhaus, 1919-1933. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-2105-3.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Éva Forgács (1 January 1995). The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics. Central European University Press. pp. 58–. ISBN 978-1-85866-012-7.
  3. ↑ Giulio Carlo Argan, Walter Gropius e la Bauhaus, Einaudi, Torino 1951.

Further reading

  • Cornelius Steckner: Motion and Emotion for Engineers: The Guggenheim Color Machine and Multimedia Art, Proceedings XVI. Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, New York 2000, 123-124.
  • Cornelius Steckner: Symbol formation. Sign Systems Studies, Vol. 32, 1/2, 2004, 209-226, ISSN 1406-4243.
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