Otti Berger

Otti Berger (* October 4, 1898 in Zmajevac / Baranja, Hungary; † 1944/45 in Auschwitz concentration camp) was a textile artist and weaver and a member of the Bauhaus.

Career

Berger attended at the art academy in Zagreb until 1926 and then continued her studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, where she studied under László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, among others. Berger has been described as "one of the most talented students at the weaving workshop in Dessau."[1]

A core member of the experimental approach to textiles at the Bauhaus,[2] Berger experimented with methodology and materials during the course of her studies at the Bauhaus to eventually include plastic textiles intended for mass production.[3] Along with Anni Albers and Gunta Stözl, Berger pushed back against the understanding of textiles as a feminine craft and utilized rhetoric used in photography and painting to describe her work.[2] During her time in Dessau, she also wrote a treatise on fabrics and the methodology of textile production, which stayed with Walter Gropius and was never published.[3]

Berger acted as a mentor to younger Bauhaus students who carried on the Bauhaus methods, such as Paris-based weaver Zsuzsa Markos-Ney and Ethel Foder, who became a hand weaver in South Africa.[3]

Not allowed to work in Germany under Nazi rule because of her Jewish roots, Berger fled to London, where attempts to emigrate to United States failed.[4] From there, she was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she died in 1944.

References

  1. ↑ Weibel, Peter. Beyond Art: A Third Culture. A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary. Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 2005. p. 76
  2. 1 2 T’ai Smith. Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Project MUSE. Web. June 13, 2015. https://muse.jhu.edu.
  3. 1 2 3 Weibel, Peter. Beyond Art: A Third Culture. A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary. Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 2005.
  4. ↑ Fischer, Linn. "Otti (Otilija Ester) Berger. 1898 – 1944." Aviva: Online Magazin fuer Frauen. Berlin: 2015.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, December 13, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.