Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics by Elizabeth Otto (review)

Those who read any conventional history or exhibition catalog of the Bauhaus will likely associate the famed modernist art school with male architects, designers, and painters such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Mies van der Rohe. The Bauhaus, when viewed exclusively through the more canonical works of its masters, maintains its reputation as an innovative, ultra-modern school of architecture and design, a center of masculine rationalism with a signature style of pared-down elegance and simple, geometric forms. Those who read Elizabeth Otto’s outstanding book Haunted Bauhaus, however, will come away with a different set of artists’ names: Gertrud Grunow, Ré Soupault (Renate Richter Green), Gertrud Arndt, Hermann Trinkaus, Max Peiffer Watenphul, and Margaret Camilla Leiteritz, just to name a few. One hundred years after the founding of the Bauhaus (1919), Otto gives readers an expansive and nuanced view of the art school by focusing on the work of its students as well as its masters and by examining the elements of Bauhaus culture and production that have been ignored or repressed in existing scholarly narratives. Looking carefully at the areas of life that she lists in the book’s subtitle— occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics— Otto shows how these life experiments manifested themselves in the artistic production of the Bauhäusler (Bauhaus students). In so doing she gives life to the school’s “ghosts” of irrationalism, abstraction, and innovative play, not just with built forms but with gender and sexuality. Using Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997) as her theoretical foundation for the notion of a Bauhaus history that is haunted by alternative modes of being, Otto explores each of those modes through a combination of meticulous biographical research on artists and close readings of art objects. One of the greatest pleasures of reading this book lies in Otto’s sharp analyses of works of art that view the object from multiple perspectives and are written in clear, engaging prose.

What emerges from the pages of Otto’s monograph is a much messier but all the more fascinating picture of what the Bauhaus was, who studied and worked there, and what kinds of artworks they produced. There are few images of sleek buildings, chairs, or home decor; in their place are experimental photographs, photomontages, satirical drawings, and political posters. Otto devotes separate chapters to each experimental mode named in the subtitle, but the central role that women played in all facets of life and artistic production at the Bauhaus is a thread that runs through the entire book. This monograph is the culmination of Otto’s extensive scholarly work on gender and the Bauhaus, which began with her 2005 catalogue raisonné of Marianne Brandt’s photomontages (Tempo! Tempo!) and continued in numerous collaboratively edited volumes such as The New Woman International (with Vanessa Rocco, 2011) and Bauhaus Bodies (with Patrick Rössler, 2019). Contrary to existing scholarly narratives that focus on the limitations placed by the Bauhaus’s male-run administration upon women’s admission to the school and to their chosen trajectories once they arrived, Otto emphasizes the women students’ canny ability to adapt to challenging social and political circumstances, their presence in “every workshop and class at the school” (5), and the ways that the objects they made reflected a sense of play with gender roles and/or a critique of the constraints they experienced. Haunted Bauhaus is a much-needed project of historical recovery of forgotten Bauhaus artists that disrupts a common understanding of the school and its assumed signature style. Recognizing and revealing artistic works and identities that do not fit into the historical understanding of the Bauhaus as progressive and rational, Otto exposes that understanding as myth. She may continue to celebrate the Bauhaus as a site that fostered “a questioning of traditional models of desire and identity” (139), but she also presents readers with a clear-eyed...