The so-called Bielefeld Conspiracy asserts that the German city of Bielefeld doesn't exist. Have you ever been to Bielefeld?, it asks. Do you know anyone who has ever been to Bielefeld? Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? If your answer to all three questions is no........ how do you know Bielefeld exists? A similar conspiracy could be built around Gertrud Kleinhempel, one of Germany's first professional furniture designers and who for the greater part of her career was active in Bielefeld.
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"The work of the Dresden artist Margarete Junge is largely shrouded in darkness" noted the art historian Gert Claußnitzer in his introduction to the 1981 exhibition "Margarete Junge. Fashion sketches and flower studies"1 And while Margarete Junge's 2D works may have been allowed to shine, if only briefly, in the early 1980s, her 3D works remained stubbornly shrouded: only in recent years being afforded the opportunity, if only partially, to radiate as they once did. Thankfully. For the works,
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In 1968 the East German designer Rudolf Horn opined that "the changed tenor of industrial production in the socialist society, in relation to its task of satisfying cultural needs on a mass scale, raises the question of how despite mass production the consumer can realise an individual [domestic] environment, and in addition forces us to consider the problem of how the cultured personality can creatively contribute to the design of their immediate surroundings."1 How indeed....? It was,
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According to our old friend Roget possible synonyms for "August" include great, noble, impressive or worshipful. We can't promise the following quintet of exhibitions will exactly meet such qualities; however, they promise to be anything but frivolous, undignified or flighty explorations of their subject, and therefore certainly should be tending to the August in August 2019....... "New rollout. bauhaus wallpaper" at the Kulturgeschichtlichen Museum Osnabrück, Germany Although Bauhaus,
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History is not only written by the winners, and re-written by those who can't accept the facts of their defeat, but history is also the story of the visible, those who are invisible having nothing to contribute. With the exhibition Against Invisibility – Women Designers at the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau 1898 to 1938 the Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden not only re-introduce nineteen, largely, forgotten female creatives, and therefore allow their contributions' to history to be recorded, but in
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