Ariel Aloni donates 38 artworks of to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

Yael Aloni, the mother of Ariel Aloni – who lives in New York – had preserved the works of her mother Gunta Stölzl for forty years – she will now be honoured through the name of the collection. Gunta Stölzl is renowned most of all through her work as a weaver and textile designer, but she also directed her artistic talent and skills into painting. Gunta Stölzl produced many of these sheets between 1915 and 1919, others on journeys in her years at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1926 to 1931, a few later. The works mainly show landscapes, urban views and country scenes. Three drawings by Bella Broner, one of Gunta Stölzl’s students at the Bauhaus Dessau, complete the full total of 38 works in the collection.

The Ariel Alonis Bequest opens up a new and profound insight into Gunta Stölzl’s artistic development. It testifies to her understanding of the effect of colour, of visual imagery and of the language of forms, which is already germinating in these early works and which she transferred with masterly skill into abstract forms in her artistic textiles produced at the Bauhaus Dessau. The extraordinarily high quality of her textile art has never ceased to astonish, down to the present day. The early linocuts from her time at the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule (School of the Applied Arts) already demonstrate Stölzl’s craftsmanship in combination with creative visual imagery. This generous bequest of the early works is of inestimable value for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the research on Gunta Stölzl and on the Bauhaus.

Gunta Stölzl was born in Munich in 1897. She studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in the city, during the First World War she served as a Rotkreuzschwester (Red Cross nurse) in 1919 she enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she produced her first textiles. Her lessons with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinksy had a great influence on her artistic development. Her extraordinary craftsmanship at the loom and her talent for communication and teaching led to the senior post as Werkmeisterin (Master of Works), in the textile workshop after the relocation of the Bauhaus to Dessau she also developed new curricula . Gunta Stölzl subsequently took over the overall direction of the textile workshop and. In 1927 she was honoured as the only woman to bear the title “Meister” (Master). She married the Bauhaus architect Aryeh Sharon (in 1929); they had a daughter, Yael. In 1931, political and personal intrigues led to Stölzl’s dismissal from the Bauhaus. She emigrated to Switzerland in the same year and founded her own textile enterprise there. Sharon had also been forced to emigrate and had gone to Palestine. The marriage was divorced in 1936. In 1942 Stölzl married again. Despite all personal and economic difficulties she continued to design and develop innovative textiles, but also wove artistic tapestries. In 1937 Gunta Stölzl received an award at the Paris World Exposition. In the late 1950s, the MoMA in New York included one of her wall hangings into its collection. Then, in the late 1960s, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired numerous textiles by Stölzl. She was furthermore represented in many exhibitions, but was also successful economically with her hand-weaving enterprise. Until her death in 1983 she engaged in further work and study in textiles and produced innovative works on the highest possible level of craftsmanship.